


Noons of Dryness

by ellen_fremedon



Series: The Long Summer [3]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M, pre-HBP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-12
Updated: 2005-07-12
Packaged: 2017-10-02 02:28:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The siege of Hogwarts ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Noons of Dryness

**Author's Note:**

> Final story of the Long Summer trilogy; sequel to "Returns of the Day" and "Within The Pale,"and should be read after those two.
> 
> Many thanks to Sanj for beta and cheerleading, and to Bayleaf for the la-la-la meter; thanks are also due to Ide Cyan for _L'Enchant-heure_ and _L'Hebdomagique_, to stealthmuffin for La Cour du Dragon, to jgesteve for the Quartier Alchimique, and to Isis for the Rue Blard.

The Sangui Sanguinis could only be worked in the dark of the moon, but the dying crescent favored the Repudiatio; and though Potter and his friends spent the last three days of the waning moon searching frantically for some alternative to that spell, they found nothing. And so on the last afternoon of the old moon, a few hours before moonset, Granger, Weasley, Lupin and I followed Potter down to the bowels of the castle for the spell.

None of us needed to be there, strictly speaking; the Repudiatio was a one-person spell. The thought that Potter might want me for moral support seemed absurd-- but when, lying spent beside him, I had gruffly announced my intention to observe the spell, he had gripped my arm tighter and nodded. "That would help."

We trooped down through the dungeons and then below them, under the castle and into the caverns that riddled the Great Hog itself. Within and beneath the stone mound-- the howe, or haug-- on which the castle's foundations were set, a spring welled up from the rock. Its stream was long since diverted for the castle's water supply, but the streambed remained, and water seeping down through the soil, and laterally through thin limestone strata in the rock, still found its way there, to drain in a sluggish, silty flow to the lake.

The streamlet was barely shin-deep, even where it emptied into the shallow end of the underground harbor, but the Repudiatio required running water, and it would do.

The water-gates, heavy iron-clad oaken grates, were closed and barred across the length of the harbor mouth. Afternoon sun reflected off the lake outside, casting a chess-board of wavy sunlit squares over the water's surface, and onto the lime-crusted walls, the stalactite-hung ceiling.

"That's still far too exposed," I said, frowning at the gates, the grillwork that would admit a man's wand arm. Three or four massed levitation spells would be all it would take to lift the massive bar from its rests...

Lupin nodded. "You're right. We'll have it bricked up. First thing tomorrow."

I frowned again; Lupin's quick agreement never failed to wrong-foot me. But Potter had already stripped down to his ragged denim shorts; and Granger had produced a seamless glass sphere from her pocket. She looked up at Potter apologetically. "Give me your hand, Harry? It's just so we'll know--" She pricked the tip of his finger with a tap of her wand and a muttered spell; a drop of blood welled up, and then vanished with a rush of air. "Aparecio," she said, and tapped the glass orb; the droplet reappeared, suspended inside, round and dark red. "There. The Repudiatio will only affect what's... part of you. This should let us know..." she swallowed and patted Harry's hand.

"You'll want to strengthen that globe, Granger," I said. "If it should shatter--"

She nodded briskly, and cast an Unbreakable charm over the little sphere before slipping it back into her pocket.

Weasley held Potter's robes, folded sloppily over his arms. "You sure you want to do this yourself, mate?" He clutched the armful of fabric tighter.

Potter nodded glumly. "It's more certain, if I do it. I think I'd better." He gave Weasley a ghost of a smile. "Thanks, though." And he turned away and stepped into the water.

He stared upstream, to where the nearly dry channel disappeared into the heart of the Great Hog, and lifted his wand to his face, and traced a shallow, crescent cut into the skin below and beside his right eye. His lips were still; he made the incision without uttering a Sectus charm.

He made the second cut above his heart, and the third just below his navel, and only then opened his mouth. _Repudio_. Blood rose up from all three cuts, in bright round beads.

He turned and faced downstream, and knelt in the shallow water; I had to step a pace down the rocky shingle to see his face again. Behind me, Granger gasped.

Potter's blood was flowing freely now, though the cuts had healed over without a trace; it welled from his nipple, and spilled over, slow and dark, from his navel. He blinked bloody tears from his eye; one, and then another, fell into the still water. I could hear the faint sound, magnified by echoes until the cavern rang; from far upstream, in answer, came a distant and hollow roar.

Potter knelt in the shallow water; blood spread out around him in rusty clouds. He spoke another incantation, but I could not make it out over the continuing echoes of the water's splash, the too-loud susurrus of far more water than the dry streambed had seen in--

\--I saw the wave only an instant before it struck Potter, too late to cry a warning, but Potter only swayed, unbowed, his lips still moving, chanting incantations I could not hear, as water suddenly flooded the stream, foaming and churning as it rose and swirled around him, washing the blood away. I looked at Lupin-- his eyes were wide, and his knuckles white on his wand. He'd not expected this either, then.

Lupin had told me the Repudiatio was a simple spell-- quick, over in seconds-- but the water kept coming for a long time, more water than the springs should ever have given up. When it finally receded, there was no trace of blood on Potter's skin, nor even any stain on his sodden shorts. Potter knelt there, hands on his knees, breathing hard. Water poured down from his hair; his glasses shed it without a trace, but it ran in shining rivulets down his cheeks and over his parted lips.

Weasley and Granger pressed past me to the water's edge, Weasley's hand fluttering at his side, as if uncertain whether to offer Potter a hand up. Potter looked up and nodded at nothing. "I'm all right, Ron. I'm... it's all right." He climbed out of the streambed unaided, but he let Granger cast a drying charm, let Weasley drape his robe over his bare shoulders.

Lupin solemnly held out Potter's battered trainers; the gesture made me the only one without an offering, and though the image was absurd-- four grown or near-grown wizards lining up to press gifts into Potter's hands-- it felt disturbingly prescient. I clenched my empty hands at my sides and watched Potter knot his shoelaces. But he caught my eye when he straightened up, and gave me a small nod. "It worked. I felt it. I'm... not her son." He laughed, once, the mirthless laugh I was coming to recognize. "Does that make me a pureblood now?"

"Repudiatio has been used that way, in the past," I said.

Potter started, but the fey laugh died in his mouth. "God. Every time I think the pureblood crowd can't get any more fucked-up..."

"You're nothing like their lot, Harry," Lupin said, and steered him along the bank toward the water-gates and the postern door set into their last panel; the rest of us followed. "That was bravely done."

Lupin spoke evenly, but Potter caught the roughness in his voice and looked up at him, stricken. "Remus. I'm sorry."

"There was no other way, Harry--" began Granger, but Lupin silenced her with a hand on her shoulder.

"Harry, none of this--" he gestured vaguely at the stream, the harbor-- "changes my memories of my friend. I still have everything of Lily that I ever did."

Granger looked at him sharply at that, but said nothing; she took hold of Potter's arm instead, and Weasley took the other. I fell into step behind them, beside Lupin. "You too?" I muttered-- quietly, but in the cavern the sound carried.

Lupin frowned at me. "Lily?"

Granger stumbled, almost pulling Potter down with her; Potter came to a halt and turned and stared.

"One last-ditch effort to fancy girls, I suppose?" I kept walking right past Potter and his friends. "At least, that's what it was in my case," I muttered.

Lupin caught up; Potter, Granger, and Weasley followed, circling behind us like sheepdogs. "You never..." Lupin gestured vaguely.

I snorted. "Not likely. You?"

Lupin didn't answer. Potter caught him up. "Remus?" He caught Lupin's sleeve as we came to the water-gates and a square of afternoon sunlight fell over Lupin's face. "Remus, you're blushing."

"Lupin, you sly old dog." I smiled the smile that I knew made him want to hit me. "Did Potter know you'd pulled his bird behind his back?"

Lupin narrowed his eyes at me, and turned back to Potter. "This was before Lily began seeing James. And in any case, very little ever went on between us."

"Don't blame yourself, Lupin." I raised the bar of the narrow postern with a flick of my wand, and let it hang, poised in the air, before dropping it heavily on its pivot "They say it happens to the best of us." I led the way outside and started up the narrow stairs against the castle wall; as I swept past him, I could see that Lupin's blush had deepened.

"Remus," said Granger and Weasley together. There was a complicated gestural dance, at the end of which Granger stepped away to let Lupin out the door and onto the little walled-in landing of the stair. I stopped halfway up the stair. Weasley ran first his hand and then his wand over the retaining wall that held the lake water back from the postern and the foot of the stair. "When you have them brick up the gates, they should take this wall down-- maybe break up this landing, too," he said. "Flood the door, instead of walling it in-- we'd still have it for a sortie, but we could hold it from inside easier than they could force it."

Lupin nodded. "Good thinking, Ron; I'll see that it's done. Hermione, what were you going to say?"

"Oh, nothing really." She started up the stairs, pulling Weasley after her and so leaving Potter next to Lupin. "I just wondered if you were going to finish that story about-- about Lily."

It was a completely transparent ploy, and I had no doubt that Lupin and Potter both saw through it-- but Potter smiled and said "I'd like to hear it," and Lupin needed no more prodding. Granger gave me a guarded nod as we came up onto the south lawn, but thankfully, said nothing to me.

It was dusk, and even though the castle lay between us and the encampment-- even knowing the Dark Lord would be otherwise occupied tonight-- it felt dangerous being out of doors.

We were not even outside the walls. The outer curtain cut right across the grounds and the road, all the way down to the water's edge. Across the narrow neck of the lack, a fence of palings had been driven into the lakebed, connected by iron chains. The new earthen wall, surmounted by its own wooden pale, ran right down to the lake edge, and for some distance on either side of the water the ditch inside the wall was flooded; the resulting shallow moat ran all the way to the raised causeway by which the road passed through the Boar Gates. The gates themselves were barred and barricaded, and within the makeshift guardhouse I could see figures moving.

That in a few short months, these few acres of sheep-bitten lawn should come to seem so open and vulnerable was nearly obscene; my unease at the sight of so much sky above me only hardened my resolve to stay out of doors for as long as I might.

Or as long as Potter stayed out, at least, and that might well be all night. He had consigned his last blood relation-- no, not that, not anymore. He had consigned the woman who, however grudgingly, had given him food and houseroom since his infancy to a gruesome death tonight; if nothing else, he would keep vigil until Granger's glass showed her passing.

Potter drifted halfway up the steps to the west doors before sitting down, elbows on his knees, and motioning to Lupin to sit and continue his tale; Granger and Weasley took seats behind him, one to either side. I leaned against the plinth that edged the stairs, listening with one ear to Lupin. I had nothing to add to his stories. Lupin had known Lily Evans; had loved her, I suppose. I had only convinced myself, for about two weeks at the start of fifth year, that I fancied her, after watching her put down James Potter and Sirius Black, devastatingly, and walk away the winner of the field.

I followed her, after that, hoping to see her deliver the blow that would put Potter and Black in their place, once for all, but that blow never fell, and eventually I realized it never would; she had no real quarrel with Potter and his coterie, and she seemed to enjoy her many, small, public victories. I gave up on her in disgust. And then on Halloween, Evan Rosier sucked me off behind Greenhouse Four, and let me return the favor, and I gave up on girls altogether.

Lupin had taken longer to reach the same conclusion. But he seemed to have made a good friend in Lily along the way; I tried to feel superior, but it was harder than usual.

When Lupin fell silent, it was Granger who drew him out with questions. Potter listened silently, rolling Granger's glass orb between his hands and watching the blood droplet break and smear over the inside, then flow back into a single dark blot. His hair fell over his eyes; his shoulders were drawn up, tense and high. Weasley's and Granger's knees flanked his head, close enough that he could have laid his cheek against either's leg, that he could have thrown his arms around their waists or leaned into the net of their linked arms and clasped hands, but he sat folded over on himself, making no move to touch either of them.

I only realized I was staring when I felt Weasley's eyes on me. I met his gaze. Give him credit; the boy didn't even blink. After a moment, he unlaced his fingers from Granger's and let his hand rest on Potter's shoulder, and Potter didn't shake it off. Weasley looked away.

The sun had set; I couldn't neglect my workroom all night. When I had finished showing Finch-Fletchley how to begin refining Wolfsbane from the aconite base, I stopped in the Great Hall on the way back outside, hoping to find supper not yet cleared away, and found Minerva levitating plates. "Ah, Severus. Is Harry still outside?" she asked, as though she didn't have the damned map. "And the others? I thought so. Help me take these out to them."

Lupin went inside after supper, but he came back and joined us in the early morning, after a few hours' sleep; Minerva stayed all night. We all had our hands on our wands, ready to cast a massed Containment Charm if it looked for an instant like the Repudiatio had gone wrong, but of course, if that had been the only reason for the night's vigil, we might have Contained Potter and gone to bed.

Minerva had no shortage of stories about Lily, of course, and Potter had still not tired of hearing them-- or else he had not sufficiently punished himself with them. I doubted he knew which it was. But after midnight, when the Mark went up over the camp and Granger went away to decrypt it, Minerva faltered in the middle of her tale-- something about Lily's run-ins with the Underaged Wizardry restriction-- and Potter did not prompt her to resume it.

It was false dawn, the air damp with dew and the sky a watery gray, when the drop of blood inside Granger's glass began to tremble and stretch. I cast _Contineo_, and Lupin and Minerva followed, in unison; the blood drop went up in smoke. Potter shuddered, and winced as though his scar had pained him. But then he sat up straight, and let his breath out, slow and heavy.

"_Finite Incantatum_," I murmured.

"You okay, mate?" Weasley had interposed himself between Potter and me when I had come back with Minerva, sitting beside him like a bodyguard, and I could not tell whether he was keeping me from Potter, or keeping us apart under Minerva's watchful eye. He bent down to catch Potter's eye, and I knew he was looking at the scar.

"Yeah." Potter let Weasley take the glass orb, and pushed his hair back from his forehead. In the weak light, the jagged red seam looked no more inflamed than it had every day since the Dark Lord had settled in on our doorstep. "I'm all right."

Weasley clasped Potter's shoulder and passed the glass to me. It was full of red vapor and resembled nothing so much as a Remembrall. "I'll take charge of this," I said, tucking it into my sleeve. The miasma's magical properties had never been fully documented, and Lupin, as he was so fond of reminding me, did not have my grounding in the experimental Dark Arts.

At the very least, the little sphere would be a potent weapon if the Unbreakable charm were removed; and I preferred to know where such things were.

Potter nodded to me. "Keep it. I don't want to look at it." His eyes fell on Weasley's hand, and he only then seemed to notice the touch. He smiled at Weasley, briefly and faintly, and then climbed to his feet and offered him a hand up. Minerva, Lupin, and I all followed him through the front doors. None of us tried to tell Potter how lucky he was, or how brave. The first was debatable, and the second was bound to be tested again, and worse, before the war was over.

Sunrise was almost upon us, but the castle still slept. We shut the doors silently behind us, and Minerva, Lupin, and Weasley trudged to the foot of the marble stair that would take them up to Gryffindor.

Potter gave Weasley's arm a squeeze and turned away from them, toward the dungeon stairs, unmindful of Lupin and Minerva's eyes on him. Lupin, damn him, didn't look at all surprised, only disapproving.

The look on Minerva's face, though-- ah, now that, I hoped to live long enough to treasure. "Good night, Minerva," I said cordially. "Lupin. Weasley. Or good morning, I suppose." And with a nod and a half-bow, I turned and crossed the hall. Potter made his own good-nights-- I didn't hear any trace of a smile in his voice-- and fell into step beside me. We were all the way down the stairs before I heard the Gryffindors' footfalls resume.

I locked up the glass in a coffer and locked the coffer in a heavily-warded cabinet. Potter appeared at my shoulder as I turned the key, already out of his robe. "Thanks," he said. He lifted a hand almost shyly and brushed my hair away from my neck, so he could drop a kiss; when I turned around to return it, he was crossing the room, toeing off his trainers and stepping out of his shorts as he went. He turned back the bedclothes.

I took off my own clothes and slid into bed beside him. Potter caught my hand, though he held it away from him. "Did you really have a thing for Lily?" He didn't stumble at all over the name.

I thought of answering the questions Potter hadn't asked: _I don't know how like her you are. I barely knew her. I don't even see your parents in you any more._ But all I said was, "I thought I did. Briefly."

I felt more than saw Potter's nod. He was silent for a moment. "And-- James?" And there he did stumble.

There was no doubt at all how to answer that. "No." It came out a bit more firmly than I'd anticipated.

Potter drew my hand up over his chest, pulled us together and settled in under my arm. "Good."

~*~

Minerva waited to buttonhole me until I'd filled a plate with what was left of breakfast and was tangled up in the line for the tea-urns, with no way to escape. "Severus? Come and join me in the staff room, please."

She sat down across the table from me and fussed with her tea, warming it with a carefully-aimed Calidus charm. I expected the first words out of her mouth to be about Potter, but when she set down her teaspoon she drew a small roll of parchment out of her robes and set it before me. "Last night's plaintext."

I opened the scroll. Only a few lines of Granger's small, neat writing sat in the center of the page, surrounded by blank space: _Sangui S. failed. Dark Lord v. angry; new plan in motion, only Wormtail knows details. Spies in Calais. _

The scroll rolled up on itself with a snap when I set it down. "Have they been warned?"

"Moody sent a Portkey this morning. We think they've made no attempt to reply, but if all were well, they'd wait until the afternoon drop. Moody's tightened the wards down, though, and he has sentries watching all the weak points."

I ran over the castle map in my head: the planned lacuna in the North tower had left three sympathetic weaknesses in the wards: one in a pantry off the kitchens; one at the head of the Charms corridor, in front of a statue of Alberich the Unctuous; and one in the middle of the trophy room. They could all be kept under close guard, and none could be breached undetected. The lacuna in Trelawney's old classroom was only slightly larger than a Quaffle, and would permit nothing to enter except Portkeys made within the Hogwarts wards; every third one of those still rebounded, or made it through only in pieces. If there were spies in Calais, they were likely no immediate danger to the castle itself.

But if the force mustering there were sabotaged, or attacked outright-- "Have we contacted the allies directly? Perhaps a second muster, elsewhere...?"

"We had a return Portkey half an hour ago from Charlie Weasley's group in Romania; he's passed the word on. They're discussing it in Paris today." I scowled; if there were spies in Calais, I wouldn't have wagered anything on the security of the Paris talks. Minerva mirrored my expression. "I know, I know. I believe Charlie Weasley has been making informal inquiries among those we know to be trustworthy; weve sent another Portkey for his next report. Even if something should happen at Calais..." She shook her head as though warding off the image. "They won't give up on us that easily, Severus." She took back the parchment and tucked it away, and then folded her hands and looked levelly at me. When I said nothing, she sighed. "I also wanted to talk to you about... well. About matters inside the castle."

"Minerva, if this is about Potter--"

"Of course this is about Potter," she snapped. "Harry Potter, Severus? Of all people, _Harry Potter_?"

I'd had the same thought myself, quite often over the last fortnight, but I forbore to say so. "Minerva, he's eighteen and I'm not his teacher, not officially at least. We've done nothing illegal."

Minerva frowned at my choice of adjective-- _nothing wrong_ would have been a stretch, and we both knew it-- but she let it pass. "I'm not accusing you of taking advantage of Harry, Severus. To be quite frank, I don't believe you could."

I was less certain; I suspected Potter would be distressingly receptive to the sorts of emotional manipulation my own lovers had practiced on me when I was his age. "I'll take that as a compliment to my moral rectitude," I said, though I knew Minerva had not been thinking of such subtleties-- and to be sure, any man who tried to rape Potter outright would be lucky to escape with his life, luckier still to walk away with his balls intact.

Minerva gave a little snort. "Severus, your being within the letter of the law is not the issue. Harry is old enough to make his own mistakes; I accept that." She narrowed her eyes at me, peering first through her glasses, then over them. "But that does not make it any less irresponsible of you to start this-- this relationship with Harry."

"Potter started it!" I protested.

The look Minerva gave me made me feel eleven years old again. "I have no doubt that he did. And of course, you had no choice but to comply, because you always let Mr. Potter have his own way in everything."

"Minerva," I said, through gritted teeth, "the next time a passably attractive, virile wizard half your age and with twice your power corners you in your office and does his best to extract your tonsils with his tongue, do you expect me to believe you'll send him packing without the slightest frisson of temptation?"

Minerva blinked, twice, and then settled back into her chair. "You're welcome to find out, Severus," she purred.

I snorted. "You're a lecherous old cow, Minerva."

"Takes one to know one, Severus." She said it without any trace of a smile.

I sighed and drank down my tea at a gulp; it had gone quite cold. "I'm not throwing him out of my bed, Minerva. If you want us to break it off, talk to Harry. See how far you get with him."

She raised her eyebrows at the name. "Then I wash my hands of the matter. Don't come crying to me when he breaks your heart, Severus."

I must have stared; she cocked her head and regarded me curiously. "I thought this was about Potter's well-being?"

She didn't smile, but her face softened almost imperceptibly. "Harry Potter's heart has very seldom led him wrong, Severus. I do wish I could say the same for yours."

~*~

Theodore Nott was waiting outside my office when I returned from breakfast. He and Millicent Bulstrode were the only two eighth-years left in Slytherin; and with Bulstrode working a daily shift in the laboratory, I had asked Nott not to move out of the dormitory yet; my sixth and seventh-year classes were small enough now that I was hard-pressed for enough prefects to manage the younger students. Nott had taken the slender authority I'd given him and made much of it, as I had suspected he would, but he'd wielded that authority far better than I'd expected him to, making himself essentially my major-domo and taking care of the minor business of the House very nearly as well I would have done. "Sir, it's the Dearborns and Mrs. Grimstone, they're waiting in your office, I told them you weren't in but they insisted--"

"Yes, thank you, Nott. No, don't leave," I added, as he turned back up the corridor to the dormitories. "Consider meeting with parents another part of your prefectural duties. After you." I took a deep breath and opened my office door.

The latest first-year students to arrive with the tide of refugees had come in last week: Owen Dearborn and Leticia Grimstone, cousins, who with their parents and younger siblings had flown in on an ancient and illegal Turkish carpet. Like all of next year's intake currently in residence, they had been Sorted on arrival; the Hat had placed them in Slytherin.

The parents, Gryffindors all, had not been pleased. Since the children's Sorting, they'd had a constant string of complaints-- about the state of the dungeon dormitories, about the tutoring and training I'd arranged, as though the summer vacation schedule had any meaning now-- but until now, they'd made them to the Slytherin prefects.

"Mr. and Mrs. Dearborn, Mrs. Grimstone. Mr. Nott tells me you have some concern that my prefects are unable to address." I sat down at my desk; Nott took up a spot a pace behind me, folding his hands and cocking his head deferentially. He'd learned a great deal watching his father bow and scrape to Lucius, though possibly not the lessons Theophilus Nott had intended.

Eiluned Dearborn Grimstone had taken the center chair; she smiled tightly. "Professor Snape. We've been talking to some of the other parents in the castle, and-- well, first, I want to make it clear, it's not that we distrust you."

I silently counted to three, but she didn't go on. I inclined my head a fraction. "I'm pleased to hear it."

Her smile tightened even more. Jonathan Dearborn leaned in and rested his hands on my desk. "We know that you're highly placed within the Order, Professor Snape. I'm sure you must have a good reason for it."

The Dearborns had lost an elder brother to Order business in the first war; their sole involvement in this one, prior to their flight to the castle, had been Eiluned's letter to the Daily Prophet shortly after Dumbledore's ouster two years before, rather disjointedly claiming that to imply the Dark Lord had risen again was to impugn the honor of those who had fought him before and render their sacrifices null and void.

Neither Eiluned nor Jonathan had been targeted for recruitment by the Order this time round.

I glanced curiously at Nott, not even trying to be surreptitious; he shrugged. "A good reason for what, Mr. Dearborn?"

His sister answered. "Professor Snape, more than half the children Sorted this spring have ended up in Slytherin. You can't tell me that's normal."

"It's not typical, no. But neither is it my doing, Mrs. Grimstone. If you really wish to take the matter up with the Sorting Hat, I can arrange an interview, though I doubt it will be any more forthcoming about its motives with you than it has been with Headmistress McGonagall or myself."

The Dearborn siblings frowned at each other. Mrs. Dearborn was determinedly reading the labels of the jars on the shelf nearest her, and refusing to meet the others' eyes.

Jonathan Dearborn slid forward in his chair. "But surely, you and Professor McGonagall, you've got some influence over the Sorting Hat, right? Some idea what it's planning?"

"It won't go further than this room, I promise," said Mrs. Grimstone.

I smiled, and Dearborn immediately straightened up and put his hands on the arms of his own chair. "Well. The Headmistress and I do both have our theories." Nott shifted at my side, curious; the Dearborns sat expectantly. "Professor McGonagall is of the opinion that your children's generation will have much need of the qualities Slytherin House fosters: the will to win this war, and the vision and ambition to remake the wizarding world after."

Mrs. Dearborn had turned away from my potions stores, looking interested despite herself; Eiluned fidgeted nervously. I'd counted up to five before Jonathan Dearborn demanded, "And is that your opinion, too, Professor? That the Sorting Hat wants us to beat You-Know-Who at his own game?"

"Not at all, Mr. Dearborn. I believe the Sorting Hat is aware that eight Slytherins withdrew from this school, or were withdrawn by their parents, last year; that three are missing, that one was expelled and that four of my students are dead. I believe the Sorting Hat knows full well which dormitory has the most empty space. Now," I said, and looked meaningfully at my desk clock, "if you would like to see Owen and Leticia, I believe the first-years' Defense lesson should be letting out any minute now. Mr. Nott can show you to the common room if you would care to wait there."

Nott shepherded the Dearborn siblings out the door quickly enough, but Mrs. Dearborn hung back. "You've really lost so many?" She rubbed her hand over the heavy oak beam of the doorframe. "All those children?"

"Every House at Hogwarts has had losses," I said. Nott hovered behind her, one hand on the door.

She saw him there and started, but then gave him a careful nod. She looked levelly back at me. "Don't lose Owen."

~*~

A mishap in the laboratory left my robes perforated with small holes-- the warlock Patil had recruited as an assistant tripped while carrying an unstoppered flask of chimaera bile-- and I stopped in my quarters to change before lunch.

Potter's broom was propped by my umbrella stand. A stack of his books sat in the center of my coffee table. And in my bedroom, there was Potter: his trunk was open at the foot of my bed, and with lazy flicks of his wand he directed a stream of robes and shirts and socks into my wardrobe and dresser.

"Potter, what are you doing?" I asked, though the answer was obvious.

He turned around; an airborne shoe fell to the floor. "The dorm's shrinking," he said. "Upstairs. It's just two first-years and me, and they're so scared of me that even before I started sleeping down here, I was sneaking around trying to stay out of their way. And now the other two beds have gone and mine's about to get squeezed out." He sent the shoe to join its mate. "But I since I haven't slept in it all month, it seemed pretty silly to make a fuss." He turned back to the trunk.

"And I suppose it never occurred to you that I might make a fuss, as you so dismissively put it?" I intercepted a shirt that had been shrunken and then enlarged again, to the point that that the seams and hem were misty and insubstantial.

"Well, no, I reckoned you probably would." A stack of wadded y-fronts drifted through the air and landed in a dresser drawer. "But since it's not like you've really got any grounds, I'm not worried about it." The shirt jerked out of my hands and into the wardrobe.

"I have no grounds to resent your, your usurpation of my space, of my--"

"Look, if you don't want my things where I put them, move them. Pack it all back in my trunk, I don't care." He shut the trunk and turned back to me. "I'm sorry I just sprang this on you, all right? I'd have waited, only I was afraid if I didn't get my things out of the dorm, they were just going to get swallowed by the walls or something." He came up and laid a hand on my chest, very lightly. "And since I have been sleeping here-- well, I don't want to take space away from someone who doesn't have anywhere else to go."

I didn't take his hand away, but I kept my own hands at my sides. "And the lairs of your fellow eighth-years have no appeal?"

His fingers tensed in my robe; through one of the holes the chimaera bile had burned, I felt his nail scratch me. "I'm not living in a cupboard, Snape. I'll move into the refugee dorms or I'll camp out on the lawns if you don't want me down here, but I'm not doing that again."

"Very well," I said tightly. "Just stay out from underfoot. And keep your things out of my way."

"I will." He smiled, and stretched up to steal a kiss. I was too ill-tempered to return it. Potter was right-- it was only sensible for him to keep his things where he slept, and I wasn't about to suggest that he sleep elsewhere-- but I resented his being so blithe about it. I shouldered past him to my wardrobe and stripped off my robes. Potter smiled hopefully, but I held it up to survey the damage and the smile faded. "Potions accident?" he said.

"Chimaera bile." I had to shove three of Potter's robes aside to find a clean one for me.

"Nasty stuff." And he paced into the sitting room as though that was the end of it. When I left, he had conjured a new shelf into one of my bookcases and was calmly arranging his books on it. He gave a smile as I walked out, as though nothing at all were amiss.

~*~

Despite the Cooling Charms, Trelawney's old office was stifling with heat; the air had been completely still since last night, hot and oppressive, and though it likely foreboded nothing worse than thunder and rain, still it put us all on edge. Not even Moody's wand hand was entirely steady as we waited for the lacuna in the wards to disgorge the day's Portkey from Paris.

When it came, the message told us little new, and nothing heartening. "_Received your intelligence_," Bill Weasley read from the scroll, "_security measures at Calais increased_, but they don't say which ones or how. _Talks with Liaison Office proceeding_, but they don't say anything about how those are going, either. _Concerns raised in international press re: Secrecy Statute_." And they've highlighted some articles in the news packet." He tapped on shrunken bundle of newspapers the size of a matchbox, and when they had been restored, pulled the latest _L'Enchant-heure_ from the stack, and slid it down the table to Shacklebolt, whose French was flawless.

Shacklebolt frowned and _hmmm_ed over it for several minutes, while Molly gave the quartermaster's report. The gist, when he finally delivered it, was discouraging: as the muster at "an unnamed location" became harder to keep secret, the international wizarding community's support for the mission was falling off; even our allies, while none had yet withdrawn their Aurors and Hit Wizards, were coming under political fire for committing them. "They do say that there's been an influx of volunteers lately. That's something, I suppose."

"Idiots!" Minerva pursed her lips. "Not the volunteers, of course. But how secret do _L'Enchant-heure_ think we'll keep this war if Hogwarts falls? If You-Know-Who chases down the last resistance in Britain, as you know he will? If he turns to Europe next, or America? If they're this worried about hiding one battle from the Muggles, how on earth do they think they'll hide a war?"

"And Voldemort seems to be growing tired of hiding," said Lupin, coming in late through the trapdoor. "Firenze just brought Parvati Patil to see me; she scried something out on the Muggle motorway." We had dared send out a very few scouts, on high-flying brooms, but since the siege had tightened, most of our information about the castle's immediate vicinity had come from Trelawney's surviving protge. Most of the Dark Lord's camp was warded against scrying, but outside the camp's boundaries, Miss Patil could sometimes get a picture of his soldiers' actions. "He had two cars full of Muggles waylaid during the night. They've been found on the road, just in front of the Hogsmeade turning." He sat down heavily next to Potter. "A calling card, I suppose. They were-- do you want the details?"

No one did. We heard them anyway.

The meeting broke up with nothing decided and no new plans. There was nothing we could do that we had not already done: put out twice the sentries, drill everyone who could handle a wand, share all the intelligence we had with our allies. We had made the castle as secure as we could-- the water-gate had been bricked up that morning, and the stair landing outside it broken apart. We had averted Voldemort's strike at Potter.

At what cost that last had been accomplished, I was not yet sure. The loss of Lily's lingering protection seemed unlikely to cause us trouble. Requiring Potter to sacrifice his aunt, likewise: he had not cared for her, we had had no use for her, and we had all learned, weeks ago, to consider anyone caught by the Death Eaters dead from the moment of capture.

No, Potter was dealing with the matter like a soldier, for the most part: resigned to the inevitability of the sacrifices demanded of him.

But his resignation worried me. I didn't for a moment believe he wasn't angry, and like so many other dangerous things, I liked Potter's anger to be where I could see it: turned outward, displayed. Used, even against me.

Potter had made some use of his anger, in the days before the Repudiatio. He'd spent long days in the library with Lupin and Granger looking for a magical solution, or up on the towers with the Weasley twins and Shacklebolt looking for a non-suicidal way of bombarding the encampment. He'd left each morning grim and resolved. But he'd come back to my bed every evening, bowed with failure, all his anger turned inward.

The first night, he came back smudged with ink and soot and asking to be fucked, hard. But when I laid him down, held him down, he fought me. It was not the playful wrestling he'd drawn me into in the past: there was real resistance in Potter's body, though he would not leave off begging until I had overcome it. And I did, at last; but feeling Potter struggling to not throw me off, I had to struggle to not fight him back in earnest, to not pinch and scratch and pull his hair, to end it, immediately and finally. Drawing out the fight made me as tense as Potter; by the time I finally had Potter pinned under me, open to me, I had almost lost my erection. Potter was so tight around me it had to have hurt him, but he only begged me to fuck him harder; and though his orgasm left him completely spent, it took me a long, long time to come down afterwards, even with Potter draped alongside my body, his breath warm and slow and calm against my neck.

The next night, when Potter threw himself down on his stomach beside me, I rolled away and sat up. "I'm not fighting you again, Potter, not unless you pick up your wand and face me like a wizard."

"What the-- I don't want to fight you, Snape." He lifted his face from the pillow.

"Don't you?" I said. "Or is that you just want punishment for another day of failure?"

He drew himself instantly into a crouch, coiled up as if to spring. "I've spent the last two days working my arse off--"

"And nothing to show for it." He clenched his fists against the sheets. "Which is it, Potter? Do you just want to be fucked until you forget? Or do you want a thrashing you're too coy to ask for?"

He grabbed his wand from the bedside table and stood up, panting with anger. "I don't want to stay here and hear how worthless I am, not from you." His erection was undiminished.

"No one's keeping you here," I said, and he turned on his heel and scooped his robe off the floor and stomped out. I waited for the slam of the outer door, but it didn't come. After a moment he stepped into the doorway, his robe hanging open from his shoulders, framing his nakedness.

"If I wanted a thrashing, I'd ask for it," he said.

I had my doubts on that score, but all I said was "Is that what you came back to say?"

Potter rolled his eyes. "You were really going to let me just walk away, weren't you?"

"You'd rather I kept you here by force? I'm afraid that's something else you'll have to ask for, Potter. I--"

"Oh, for god's sake," he said, and stripped the robe off again. "No. I-- I do want to forget, okay? So can we not talk about-- well, anything? For a while?" He sat down beside me and spread a tentative hand over my thigh.

"It could only be an improvement," I said, and he smiled and slid onto his knees.

He sucked me eagerly, going as deep as he could, but all too soon he pulled away and looked up at me, though glasses steamed with his own breath. "If I did ask you for what I wanted," he said, "would you do it?"

I swallowed; Potter's hand was still wrapped around my prick, almost tight enough, making me forget every word but yes. "I might."

He straddled my lap and rolled us over, until he was stretched out beneath me on the bed. "Hold me down? And don't let go of me."

I could do that. Potter grinned, and I realized I'd said it aloud. "Turn over," I said.

I settled him on his stomach, his legs spread wide as they would go, and I took his two hands in mine and ran them over his buttocks, working his thumbs down the furrow between them, rubbing first one and then the other across his hole until his whole body was trembling. "Hold yourself open for me," I whispered.

He grabbed two handfuls of his flesh and spread himself wide. He was unbalanced without his hands, swaying like a swimmer onto first his shoulders, then his knees. He was already breathing hard. I steadied him with one hand along his hip, one hand curled around the inside of his thigh. And then I dug my nails in and held him there, and licked a wide stripe between his clutching fingers.

I licked him open, slowly, wide swipes from the flat of my tongue giving way to tight circles from its blade, until Potter's knuckles had gone white, and his nails were digging dark red half-moons into his own skin. He bucked and twisted under my hands, trying to escape my grasp and rut against the sheets.

I licked my way up to his hand, and all around one tight-furled finger, lifted and straightened it with my teeth and tongue and sucked it into my mouth. "Touch yourself," I panted. "Inside." Potter groaned and scrabbled his fingers blindly over his skin, searching for purchase like a climber on a sheer slope. He sunk his finger into himself-- deeply, until I bit his hand. "Not so much. Hold yourself open." I tugged his finger into place with my teeth, not allowing anything past the first joint. I licked down the length of his finger, over the clutching skin around it, and up to his other hand. This time he lifted up one finger for me, let me slick it with my tongue, and slid it in next to its mate.

He held himself that way, stretched open on his own two fingers, while I licked down them and around them and finally between them. He rolled my tongue between his knuckles as he spread himself wider. His skin stretched and unfurled for me; his hole clutched and trembled. I fucked him with my tongue as deep as I could, working my teeth around his wider and wider-spread fingers until I tasted blood.

I pulled back; I'd bitten one of Potter's fingers, deep enough to break the skin. "Let go," I said. My voice was hoarse. "Let go." I had to pry my own tight-clenched hands from his hip and thigh, one finger at a time, before I could pry his own hands loose; he cried out when I pulled them away and took hold of his wrists in one hand. I fumbled with the other for the vial of lubricant, until it finally flew into Potter's hand. "Don't need any more," he murmured, even as I took it from him and slicked myself with a shaking hand. "Just do it now, in me, now, please."

I sank into him in one stroke, down to the root; and Potter arched his back and came, wildly, rubbing against the sheets and nearly throwing me off with the bucking of his hips. I clutched at his wrists and the curve of his hipbone and buried my face in his hair; he moaned while I fucked him, even after the aftershocks had finally wrung him out and left him heavy and pliant against me. I closed my teeth on the back of his neck when I came, and he cried out and thrust into the sheets as though chasing down another climax.

The night before the new moon, Potter came in very late, sliding into bed naked beside me after I had almost given up on him. "Thought we'd tracked down another spell. Just a wild goose chase, though." He slid his hands up my sides and pulled my nightshirt off, impatient. "That thing you did, last night, with your tongue?"

"What of it?" I stretched and wondered how much I might make Potter beg for it, or promise in exchange.

Potter blushed and thumbed my nipple with pretended nonchalance. "Could I do it to you?" he asked, as though I could possibly have said no.

He had none of the assurance here that he did in sucking my prick. He was maddeningly experimental at first, varying long wet strokes with the press and drag of his lips and the corkscrew twist of his tongue-tip. When I spat out "You needn't be so bloody tentative, Potter," he tried to thrust his tongue straight into me, though I was still too tight for its soft, slick pressure to do more than slide heavily over skin I'd forgotten could be so sensitive.

"More, damn you." I was writhing, spread out wantonly, waiting for the next arrhythmic stroke of his tongue. "Use your hands."

He held me open with his hands and licked me in slow, firm circles until I was quivering under his tongue, opening wider and wider for him on each circuit. I was exposed, empty, spitted on nothing at all. The rhythm he'd finally given me was not hard enough, not fast enough, to drive out my awareness of my elbows and knees, splayed out in all directions, or of how foolish my groans sounded to my own ears; and not enough to bring me to the edge of climax, no matter how I wanted it.

My arms and legs trembled; my back strained; my head hung heavy between my shoulders. Potter's hands ranged up and down my thighs; every inch of skin he touched leapt into my awareness until I was sure that the next touch must be the one to drive everything else out of my mind, the touch that would narrow my awareness down to the immediacy of Potter's hand and Potter's tongue. But that focus did not come, and did not come, and I was not large enough to contain so much sensation; surely, I could not be spread so thin, so wide, without something tearing, something essential spilling out...

"Enough," I gasped. "Touch my prick, your hands, let me come now, on your hands, I want--" and he slid one tight fist down my shaft and thrust into me with his fingers, and jerked my orgasm out of me with two hard twists of his hands.

I fell into the pillows, still clenching around Potter's fingers even as they slid from me, still shooting the last of my come even as Potter flipped me onto my back and seized my hand in his slick, warm grasp. "Next time," he panted, as he closed my fingers around his prick, "next time, I want to fuck you." He thrust into my fist and muffled his mouth against my shoulder, but I still heard what he said as he shook through his own orgasm: "Want to fuck you, want to come in you, come inside you."

"Yes," I said, and wrung shudders from him until he stilled. "Yes."

~*~

With no other intelligence about the threats against our people at Calais and Paris, and no way to shake Diggory and Broussard's complacency or even know if our worst fears were justified, we had nothing to do but retrench our fortifications and wait, impotently.

The Mark twinged each time I looked at it. I knew the spells it would take to destroy it, and every wizard who bore it; I knew the legilimentic disciplines I would need, the pathways the power would take. I knew the words to say-- indeed, they leapt to my lips, demanding utterance, if I dwelled on them too long. The nameless spell was all but complete; there as elsewhere, there was no work left to me but waiting.

And with so little to occupy my mind, I found flashes of the last few nights intruding on my thoughts all the rest of that useless day. In my workroom, at dinner, in my conference with the Slytherin prefects, I heard Potter's voice in my ear, felt the ghost of his touch like a shiver, up my thigh and down my spine. Really, I hardly needed to roll over for Potter, my preoccupation with him was already so dismayingly thorough.

I lingered long in the laboratory that evening, hoping-- in vain I knew-- for a return Portkey from Romania, or an early decipherment of the night's Mark, but when Finch-Fletchley arrived to take over from Bulstrode, I gave up. Finch-Fletchley grinned at me as I set my last cauldron to simmer. "Have a good night, Professor." It was not a simple pleasantry.

I frowned at him; surely Minerva, gossip though she was, could not have worked so quickly? I wondered again about Potter's rumored exploits among the Hufflepuffs, and leveled a glare at Finch-Fletchley that wiped the grin from his face.

Potter had not kept the morning's promise to keep his things out of my way. I had to move a stack of books from the sofa to sit down and take off my boots, and then move Potter's shoes to put them away; my bathroom was full of more damp towels than one person had any reasonable use for. And Potter himself was sprawled naked across the whole of my bed, with a book and a scroll of parchment under his nose and-- Merlin's beard-- an ink bottle nestled in a fold of the sheets.

I pointed my wand. "Potter, move that before I vanish it."

"I've been reading about conduit magic." He stoppered the ink and set it on the bedside table, and handed me the open book. "It's a lot like Legilimency, isn't it? What I'd have to do with the connection to Voldemort. With my scar."

The book was mine, though the page was scribbled over with Lupin's penciled marginalia; I did not have to read the passage to know what it said. "Partially. You'll need your Occlumency as well, to ward yourself from attack; the Dark Lord will be bound to be aware of what you're doing."

"Yeah, I figured." He took off his glasses and laid them and his wand beside the quill and ink, and watched me out of hazy, unfocused eyes while I scanned Potter's notes. His grasp of the theory was still weak, but his plan for the practical spellwork was solid, as solid as my own. He could do this.

I read it a second time, was halfway through a third when Potter took the scroll from me. "Tomorrow, all right?" he said, and brought my hand down over his sheet-draped erection. "It's been two whole days."

I yanked the sheet off and closed my bare hand around him. "And you still want to fuck me with this, do you?" I squeezed, and he arched up into my hand. "You want to work me open with your hands, with your wet little tongue, and fuck me--" his prick jumped in my grasp-- "with this?" I bent down and licked him, over and around where my thumb stroked him; he tried to thrust, and a bead of salt fluid welled up against my tongue. "Because I don't think you're going to last, Potter." I licked him again. "Certainly not long enough to fuck me as hard as I know you want to."

He took hold of my hair, bent forward until his eyes focused on mine. "So take the edge off," he challenged.

I knew he'd make me pay for teasing him. I teased anyway. Though it had been a long time since I'd bottomed-- and not for lack of opportunity-- Potter's desire for a good, hard pounding was rubbing off on me; I wanted him to make me pay, wanted him to let loose and make me stop thinking for just a few blessed minutes. And so I held his prick tight in my hand and gave it no other attention but my breath against the swelling head; instead, I licked and bit along the groove of his hipbone and the smooth seam where his thigh joined his body. I sucked a black bruise onto the inside of his thigh; I rolled his balls on my tongue and sucked them one at a time into my mouth. I drummed my wet fingers behind his balls, and circled his hole without ever penetrating him. He was shaking by the time I took his prick into my mouth again, shaking and thrusting up, and I needed only one hard suck to bring him off.

I kept swallowing around him until he'd gone quite still, and then I did work my fingers inside him, and found the gland and stroked. He moaned. "Your powers of recovery had better be up to their usual standard, Potter." I twisted my fingers, crooked them, no rhythm at all, but Potter tried to find one, working his hips in time to some quick, demanding beat. "I don't want to wait--" and I took hold of his still-slick cock-- "for this."

Potter raised himself up on his elbows. "Then get down here." I let go his prick and waited just long enough to make him squirm before I moved to comply. "No, on your back," Potter said. "I want you to watch." And he leaned close over me, until his eyes loomed huge and green, and worked my prick with slow, firm strokes until I gasped, and my own eyes fell shut. He stopped, hand completely still but for the rapid pulse in his thumb, and waited until I opened them before starting again, even slower.

When he reached out to blindly search the bedside table, I thought he was going for his glasses, until his hand came back slick. He ducked under my knees and bent my legs back, almost to my shoulders. It was a ridiculous position, bent double and completely exposed, and to maintain it took just enough effort of balance and muscle and will that I could not writhe, could not thrust, could do nothing but hold myself still for Potter's touch, for Potter's fingers carefully stroking me open.

His eyes stayed so intent on mine that I knew it for a surrender when I finally had to let them close, when he crooked his fingers inside me, dragging them heavily until he found the spot. "Damn you, Potter, get on with it."

He said nothing; I didn't open my eyes to see whether he smiled. But after a few more careful turns of his fingers-- I breathed through my teeth and shivered-- he bent over me, holding my knee against his shoulder, and with his other hand guided the head of his prick into place, and pressed slowly inside me.

I had known Potter would make me pay, but I had thought he would exact a simpler toll: rough, punishing strokes; hand-shaped bruises on my hips. It had been a long time, but when I had been accustomed to this, I had preferred the same hard pace as when I topped-- fast enough, hard enough, to push me quickly to climax before the feeling of exposure overwhelmed me.

I almost demanded that of Potter. I could have said things to him, about him, that would have made him give over all his patient, thorough care and just fuck me hard. He'd have come in about thirty seconds if I had-- when I opened my eyes, he was biting his lip, visibly holding himself back from the edge-- but I would have had the upper hand, if nothing else.

But I wouldn't have had this slow, slow press of his cock, of my body making a place for him one inexorable inch at a time; and by the time I had drawn enough breath to speak, the words I would have needed were gone, driven out of me; Potter was in me to the root, and there was no space in me for complaint, or for breath, or for any words but _More_ and _Move_ and _Damn you_.

There was no challenge left in Potter's eyes; they were blank, unfocused, half-lidded. He drew back slowly-- it burned, as it had not before, a hot sensation that I could have borne better had it hurt me-- and pressed into me again, hot and slick and slow. Potter's painstaking gentleness was more grueling than anything I could have demanded of him; sweat beaded on his brow, and his lip was bleeding by the time he was sheathed in me again.

He was desperate to do this right, make it painless and smooth and long-lasting. If I'd been crueler, I would have ordered him to give me exactly what I had expected; if I had been kinder, I might have told him to relax, to take his pleasure and see to my own once he was spent.

But I was and am a selfish lover, as Potter knew, and I had forgotten how good this could feel. Slow, slow stroking, not languid, no-- he was focused, intent, so careful to hit just the right angle each time. It was not enough to take me out of myself, not the pounding beat that would blind me to everything but breath and pulse and the need to come. Every slow stroke drove me into myself, pushed me out from the hollow core of my body and into every corner of my skin, until I could feel it stretching with every motion. My hands felt huge against Potter's warm back, their skin as thin and tender as a plum's, ripe to bursting; when I smoothed them over his shoulder blades Potter gasped and muffled his mouth against my leg. "Please," I said, "harder. Please."

He drew in a great shuddering breath and screwed his eyes shut. "Don't want this to be over yet," he said. "Not yet, not soon. You feel so good." He swiveled his hips and we both moaned. "So good, so hot inside, I want to do this for a long time."

You could do it again, I thought, again and again, but it came out as "Yes," and Potter shuddered all down his body, under my hands and inside me, and he bit down on his bloody lip and whimpered.

"God," he breathed, fucking me faster now, "if you could see your face. Severus." He dragged his belly across my heavy prick, rocked my balls between our bodies; and though I panted with each stroke and clenched around him each time he drove home, my skin was so awake and so greedy for him now that nothing could have taken me out of it. I tried to pull him even closer, to press against him everywhere I could.

He was trembling now, and so was I. I ran my hand up his spine, to tangle my fingers in the short hair at the nape of his neck. He threw his head back, teeth bared, to let me knot my fingers in his hair; he gave a deep thrust, and I clenched my fist and pulled, and then did it again to see how it shook his whole body. He licked his lips and wrenched his head away. "Touch my lips, my mouth, I love it when you--" I stopped his tongue with my fingers, and he sucked them in, deep, licking between them just as he did up the vein in my prick; and at the thought, my prick leapt slickly against his belly.

I fucked his mouth with my fingers, then, in time with his own thrusts, and then faster, harder-- and he followed, at long last, giving me a rhythm that pulled me inward, bent my back and knotted my fingers and wound every sinew tighter. I pried my fingers from his shoulder, one at a time-- my hand was so heavy with sweat and the pulse of my own blood I could barely lift it-- Potter groaned around my fingers as I reached between us. My prick was spurting even before I closed my hand around it; my back arched, my heels ground against his back, my arse clenched tight around him with each spasm, and my fingers scraped over his tongue. Potter bit down on them, hard-- his eyes screwed tight shut-- and then he gave two last deep thrusts and came, inside me; I could feel every leap and pulse of his cock, feel the shape and the pressure of him all the way out to my skin.

I reached for him with my bitten hand, and he let go my leg and pulled away, out of me, and fell against my chest, face buried in my hair; I lifted his chin and kissed his bloodied mouth-- like gasping for breath at first, just light scrapes of lip to lip, but then fiercely, as he opened his mouth and kissed me back. When we broke apart, there was no trace of blood left on his skin, nor taste of it in his mouth.

He looked down at me, brows drawn together in focus and concentration, and swallowed. "We need to get ready to do the spell," he said. "We need to talk to Ron."

"Tomorrow," I said, tightening my fingers in his hair. There were hours yet till morning. "Tomorrow."

~*~

When I returned from my early-morning stint in the laboratory, Potter was awake and dressed, curled on the sofa with his notes and quill. His lips were still bruise-dark and swollen. My _Index Maledictorum Tenebrorum_ lay open beside him.

"You might actually survive it," he said.

"Potter, I've told you I can't bear cheeriness before breakfast." I picked up the book and sat down. My thighs and abdomen ached with exertion, though not unpleasantly, and my limbs were still sleep-heavy and loose; it was more well-being than I should have been capable of feeling, under the circumstances, and it was almost a comfort to feel the tension already returning to my body, creeping up my spine and into my temples.

"Sorry," said Potter, and crooked his bitten lips. "But the curse-- you're using an Absumptor?-- is going to go through the Mark itself, right? So it's got a physical focus on your arm. Even if the corruption spreads really fast, it would still take time to kill you. You might--"

"And it will take _me_ time to compass the end of the Death Eaters. I'm the bottleneck in this scenario, Potter; I can only channel so much power at once. If I stop in time to save my own neck, chances are I won't do more than wound the rest of the Death Eaters."

"Chances are, he repeated. But there's a chance that you could. And besides, incapacitating them all might be all we need to do, if the muster at Calais comes through, if we've got people out there for cleanup--"

I rubbed my arm through my sleeve. "I'm not counting on any of those chances, Potter. Nor should you."

"Yeah, well," he said, and brushed his hair out of his face, "I'm not in the same boat, am I? I mean, Voldemort doesn't have a scar; we don't really know where the magic's going to go, after it goes through me, do we? Anything could happen."

"Precisely, I said. Anything could happen. Your odds of survival may well be better than mine."

He scowled, but didn't argue the point. "At any rate," he said, "we'll need two people who can sustain an Absumptor curse. And who have strong stomachs. Ron--" He swallowed. "God, I hate to ask him, but there's no one I trust more. And it'd hurt him even more if I asked someone else." He looked levelly at me. "What about you? Who else do we ask?"

And that was the question, wasn't it. Minerva, I trusted as much as I trusted anyone, but though I might have persuaded her to strike me down with a single, quick curse, she was too soft-hearted to stand back and keep her wand on me while I slowly died of maledictory necrosis. Moody, on the other hand, would so happily see me dead that I doubted he could exercise the necessary restraint. Lupin would not care if I lived or died, but I trusted him less than Moody for just that reason.

I'm not sure, I confessed.

Potter nodded, a look of swift calculation passing over his face. "All right. Well, we'll talk to Ron first-- and then Hermione; I can't keep this from her--"

"If you're thinking of asking Granger," I began, "while I have no doubt she'd be capable of it--"

"Not if there's any other choice," said Potter. "Hermione's-- she's really, really good at doing what needs to be done. But she has this way of convincing herself that if she needed to do it, it wasn't bad." A smile crossed his face-- wry, affectionate, not for me-- and was gone, leaving him graver than before. "I don't want her to end up thinking that about about me."

I nodded. Granger was perhaps the last person I would have handed a wand and told to kill a man with Dark magic. "If not Granger, then who?"

Harry shook his head. "First things first."

"Weasley?" I asked, though if I remembered correctly his sentry shift ran until meeting time.

Potter smiled again, for me this time; it looked impossibly lewd on his swollen mouth. "Breakfast." He stood up and offered me a hand.

If we walked into the Great Hall together, as noticeably well-shagged as we looked, Minerva might well have an apoplexy.

Then again, it might make it easier to persuade her to hex me to death. I let Potter haul me up from the sofa. "Very well."

~*~

The return Portkey from Paris arrived with two inclusions: the first, an explosive, was concealed within the second, Mundungus Fletcher's severed head.

The hidden flask of Dissultus-- or possibly Elixir Flaminis; there was nothing left to test-- had been spelled to open on a slight time-delay, just long enough to let us all identify Fletcher and take in the open-eyed horror on his face; but we were waiting with wands drawn, and the dramatic gesture gave us time enough to cast multiple Containment Charms.

I braced my wand hand with my left and settled my weight on loosely bent knees; at the other end of the loose parabola of leveled wands, Moody spun his glass eye, squinting at the bobbing head from every angle. "Pale blue potion, glass flask-- stopper's turning-- air should hit it in three. Two. One."

The wards flared, swelled, and bore back against my wand arm. I braced against the pressure, against the sudden wind that whipped around me and blew the windows open all around. The tower lurched and swayed-- I had to shut my eyes against the brightness within the spell's charmed skin-- and then the light faded, and with a heavy noise, the tower swung to a halt, solid and upright. Nothing remained within the Containment Charms but a churning red cloud. Moody stared at it for a minute more, before dropping his wand with a sharp flick. "_Finite Incantatum_," he grunted. The rest of us dropped our wands one by one, and Flitwick dropped the last charm and Vanished everything it had contained in a single flourish.

When it had gone, Minerva sat down heavily at the table. "Mundungus was in Calais, last we knew," she said. "Are the Calais and Paris groups both compromised?"

There was a silence. A bit of plaster fell from high on the wall above the Weasley clock. The walls and ceiling were spidered with new cracks; a few windows hung crooked in their casements, and most had broken panes.

"We should assume they are." Arthur Weasley shrugged and took his seat. "Hermione, what about last night's Mark?"

She was still white-faced, but she answered briskly. "There was no index mote. I've looked; Harry's looked. Draco didn't cast it last night."

Lupin turned to me. "Severus, have you--?"

I could usually perceive the loss of a Death Eater: a twinge in the Mark, sometimes a pain, and a tearing, wrenching feeling at the edges of my magic. I shook my head. "I don't think he's dead."

"Thank goodness for that, at least," said Weasley. He reached out nervously for his usual stack of parchments to shuffle, but they'd been blown across the room in the blast; he slid his palms across the table instead, leaving fading streaks over the polished oak. "The Romania group's return Portkey may have been lost in transit; we should send a new one. I think we can all agree, we're at more risk from patchy intelligence than from a clumsy effort like that, eh?"

Even Moody agreed, though he hedged the new Portkey with so many precautions it would be a wonder if it got back through.

Once the Portkey was away, Potter opened his mouth to speak. I shot him a warning glance, and though he glowered at me, he heeded it, and said nothing about our plan. "What happens," he asked instead, "if reinforcements don't come?"

It took the assembled Order half an hour to agree that we had no idea, except that nothing good would happen.

~*~

Potter buttonholed Granger on the landing below the trapdoor. "Hermione, Severus and I need to talk to you and Ron," he said. "In private."

She looked between us warily. "Ron should be back in the room by now," she said. "We can talk there."

Last time I'd gone to Granger and Weasley's converted storage cupboard, I'd fallen flat on my back, having foolishly expected the floor to be, if not level with, at least roughly parallel to the floor of the corridor outside it. This time, I let Granger go in first and see where she put her feet-- the floor was still skewed ninety degrees from the corridor, running up the wall of the old broom tower. I managed to swing my feet down to it without clinging too absurdly to the doorframe.

Potter, of course, leapt lightly to the plank floor without even looking at his feet.

Weasley was sitting between the gables at the end of the room working dragon-claw oil into an ancient and brittle wand-holster. "Harry-- Professor Snape?" He stood up, ready to buckle on the holster. "What's going on?"

"At the moment, nothing," I said. "But we may require your assistance very soon."

I pulled out a chair; Granger took the other. Potter cleared a space at the table between us and leaned. "You know the spell that Severus proposed to take down the Death Eaters, using the Dark Mark?" he said. He looked from Granger to Weasley. "We can modify it to take out Voldemort, too, from right here."

Granger's eyes darted to Potter's fringe. "Not using the Dark Mark."

"No." Potter took a deep breath. "Using my scar." His voice was level, though his hands were tight on the edge of the table. "The scar connects me to Voldemort, just like Severus's Dark Mark connects him to the Death Eaters. I can channel an Absumptor Curse through that connection, into Voldemort. I think I can kill him."

Granger shook her head. "Harry, the Order said no to Professor Snape's plan because it would kill him. This is suicide."

"But it would work," Potter said.

Weasley slapped the holster down onto the table, by Potter's hand; Potter twitched, and gave him a glare. "All right, leaving aside for the moment the fact that you're completely mental," he said, "how do you know it would work? I mean, you rebounded a Killing Curse onto You-Know-Who once and it didn't kill him then."

Granger looked down at the floor, a little furrow between her brows. "Miss Granger knows," I said.

She gave me a venomous look, but she answered, though she addressed herself to Weasley. "I think... it's because the connection to Harry is inside him. It's part of him. Voldemort has taken all kinds of precautions about being killed by other things, by spells or weapons or disease, but they wouldn't help him defend against an attack from inside his own mind."

"Ten points to Gryffindor," I said.

"But even so, Harry," she said, "we're not desperate enough yet to ask you, and Professor Snape, and, and Draco, to take on a suicide mission. The Calais muster could still come through."

"Yeah, it could," said Weasley, in a thick voice. "And if you do it, that's when it should be." He looked between his friends, and finally down at me, as if my face were the least forbidding. "If you do it now, the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters go down, but not all the ringleaders out there took the Dark Mark, did they?" I shook my head. "So they escape, because there's no one out there to block their retreat, and even if we sent out the biggest attack we could from the castle, they'd Apparate away as soon as we drove them past whatever wards we could lay down, and in another year they try again, while we're still weak. All it buys us is a little time. Unless we were almost beaten-- unless they'd taken the castle, or the Muggles were after us with aeroplanes-- there'd be no point."

He took a deep breath. "And if we were really lucky, and the Calais muster doubled with volunteers and they all turned up, enough to drive them all right up to the castle, then maybe between them and us, we could take care of the whole army." Potter watched him with almost no expression on his face; Granger was staring at the floor with her fist against her mouth.

"We're not going to be that lucky, Ron," said Potter.

"Yeah." Weasley swallowed. "I know." He stepped up behind Granger's chair and put his hand on her shoulder. "When reinforcements arrive. If we've got troops out there to keep up Anti-Apparation wards behind their lines, cut off at least some of their lines of retreat..." He wrapped both arms around Granger, and she closed her hands over his. "It might not come to that. A lot of things could happen."

"If it does come to that, Mr. Weasley," I said, "can we count on your help?"

Weasley looked from my robed arm to Potter's fringe. "To cast the curse?" He bent his head down, almost into Granger's hair, and screwed his eyes shut for a moment. They were wet when he looked up again, though his voice was steady. "Not on Harry," he said. "I can't. I--" He turned to me. "I'll help. If you need me. I'll cast the curse on you, Professor, if you'll let me, but I can't cast it on Harry." He reached out for Potter, and he and Granger pulled him both into an embrace. "I couldn't watch your face while it happens, mate. I just couldn't."

"It's all right, Ron. It's all right." Potter was the only one dry-eyed, was comforting both his friends. "But you'll be there? You'll be there with me. Thank you."

Granger lifted her head from Potter's chest and looked up at him with her jaw set. "I'll do it, Harry."

Potter dropped to his knees. "No, no, Hermione. You don't-- not both of you." He wrapped an arm around her shoulders; the other was still around Weasley's waist. "Be there for Ron afterward. Be strong for him. Will you do that?"

She nodded even as she protested. "But then who will you ask?"

Potter looked gravely from her face to Ron's. "I thought, maybe Neville."

They reached some silent consensus, and turned as one to me, clearly ready to worry the subject to death.

I was not about to argue the matter with them-- not when merely intimidating Longbottom would be so much simpler. "As my own half of this endeavor is in Mr. Weasley's presumably capable hands," I said, "I believe the choice is yours." I stood up and flung the door open; it hung like an awning over the jamb. "And on your head be it, Potter."

Weasley glanced sharply at me, and as we trooped downstairs to find Longbottom, he murmured to Potter-- low enough for a pretence of privacy, but not out of my hearing-- "He doesn't even call you by your first name."

"Sometimes he does," Potter said; I didn't have to look to know they both blushed. I waited for Potter to make the obvious rejoinder-- that he could spend his last nights before his suicide mission sleeping with whomever he wished-- but he said only, "He's good for me, Ron."

"For you?" repeated Weasley. "Not to you?"

"That too."

I pretended I had not heard.

~*~

The refugees had come in by twos and threes at first, into a Hogwarts still more school than fortress, still run by its teachers-- and increasingly, especially after the bombing of Hogsmeade station, by its older students.

Most of the students authority had dwindled, usurped, rightly, by the fully-qualified witches and wizards fleeing to the castle. But Neville Longbottom was still the undisputed master of his domain, even with half the expert herbologists of the realm under his command.

I'd been told the boy was competent with plants. And certainly, Hogwartss gardens and greenhouses had as many peculiarities as the rest of the castle, and with Sprout and Hagrid both dead, I supposed Longbottom knew them as well as anyone, now.

Still, it gave me pause to walk into the north courtyard cloister and realize that the rumors of his competence had not been exaggerated.

Over and between the traceries of the cloistered walk around the yard, vines grew so thickly I had to lift leaves out of the way to see the twine mesh on which they climbed. Grapes the size of tomatoes showed amidst the verdure, tomatoes the size of melons, and melons the size of pumpkins. Along the path into the yard, pumpkins like carriages surrounded vanes of pole beans that would have impressed Jack the Giant-Killer.

The late afternoon sun had already sunk behind the line of the roofs, but mirages hung in the air and covered the path, not retreating as we walked over and under them-- squares of sand or even air charmed to reflect, turning to give the greenery a few more hours of sunlight. In the center of the yard, terraces of box-gardens rose along the paths, stepping up like ziggurats from each side and meeting to roof the gravel walkways with cascades of green.

"Don't tread in the beds!" A witch I recognized as Diagon Alley's best herbalist looked up from a bed of aubergines like young zeppelins. "Snape, isnt it? You looking for someone? "

"Longbottom," I said.

She pointed us through the maze of plots. "Cabbages, last I saw. Right at the courgettes, alongside the blueberries-- in the boxes, there-- and left at the leeks." We went single-file down the narrow paths. The greenery seemed barely tame, moving visibly to follow the sun and the shifting mirrors, leaves rustling and the green stalks of maize creaking and groaning. Late strawberries jostled early squashes, and every stalk bore bud and flower and fruit all at once.

We found Longbottom crouched among cabbages bigger than his head, knees and hands black with dirt, wand behind his ear. With his hair full of leaves and bits of straw, cuttings trailing out of his shirt pocket and green chlorophyll smears up his arms and across his cheek, he looked like a young Vertumnus, or an ephebic Green Knight.

"Harry?" He looked up, and then got to his feet when he saw Weasley's and Granger's faces. "What's happened?"

"Nothing yet," said Potter. "Neville, can we talk to you? Privately?"

Longbottom dusted his hands off on his thighs and drew his wand. He cast a Silencing charm, tracing the spell boundaries along the bounds of the square garden plot. The rustle of leaves and the creak of the maize stopped abruptly. "Go ahead."

Potter told him, laying out our plans baldly and plainly. Longbottom listened, turning his wand in his hand. His fingers and his face turned whiter and whiter, but he listened dumbly until Potter finished with "I need you for the spell, Neville."

The boy hadn't been mis-Sorted, that much was clear. The first question he asked was "What do I need to do?"

"_If_ you choose to accept Potter's charge, Mr. Longbottom," I said, "you will need to cast and hold an Absumptor curse on him. The Absumptor," I went on, when he shrank a little, "is a curse of the--"

"Yes, I-- I know the charm," he stuttered. "It-- it's like a Reductor, only inside-out and not outside-in. There's a kind of pulling motion with the wand?" His voice trailed up into a question, and he stared blankly at me.

"Who on earth," I said, "taught you that spell?"

"Professor Sprout." It was my turn to stare. "It's useful against rot at the core of a wand tree," he offered. "You have to be careful, though; it's easy to weaken the sound parts that way." He shrugged; here in his own domain, the boy seemed to have no fear of me at all. "A lot of things are Dark when you use them against people. With plants, though, it's just-- useful."

"Could you use it against me?" Potter asked, very quietly.

Longbottom looked long at Potter's face, his scar. His expression was still blank, though it seemed less stupidity than stoicism. "Yes."

Potter nodded. "All right. Good. That's--" He trailed off and clasped Longbottom's shoulder. Thank you.

Longbottom shrugged again, though not hard enough to dislodge Potters hand. "You'd do it, if it had been the other way round."

~*~

Potter left me at the door of the Great Hall to dine with his friends, though he laid a tentatively proprietary hand on my arm before he turned away. I levitated my tray into the staffroom so I would not have to feel their eyes on me, Granger's still suspicious, Weasley's jealous, as though he had any reason to be. Potter gave me nothing that couldn't have been Weasley's for the asking, if he'd cared to ask.

In the staffroom, Minerva and Firenze and Lupin were gathered around a small Pensieve. "Ah, Severus, come look at this. Minerva pulled a chair out for me."

"What am I looking at?"

Lupin prodded the smoke in the basin with his wand. "The wards are down in the Cul-de-Sac," he said, naming Calais' wizarding neighborhood. "Parvati Patil scried out the headquarters there." I bent my head over the stone bowl, and the smoke stilled and cleared.

The image was hazy, but I could see a whitewashed basement room with vaulted ceilings, extending away much farther to either side than one might expect in a building of its apparent age-- much wider, I reckoned, than the upper floors would be. There were wooden tables, half of them overturned, marked with ancient graffiti in half a dozen alphabets and with very recent spell-burns; a wooden tray spun in midair, cracked and half-charred but its Hover Charm still miraculously holding. Wooden casks were piled in one corner; two were stoven in, and the fragments of another were strewn across the floor. The floor was littered with broken glass and crockery, and dark with what might have been blood, or beer, or both. There were no bodies.

I'd never been to Calais, but wizarding taverns were the same from Trieste to Trondheim, and battlegrounds were the same the world over.

"Do we know if the fight was confined to the building, or if it spilled into the Cul-de-Sac?"

"It may have spilled out into the Muggle street, for all we know," said Lupin. "Parvati caught a glimpse of the Cul-de-Sac; it's mostly deserted. The Quartier Alchimique seems busier than usual, but we haven't identified anyone Parvati saw in the Rue Blard or the Cour du Dragon." He stirred the smoke again and showed me Parisian streets, hazy, the figures only moving a few paces before the vision would loop and start over. I looked closely, but saw no known or suspected Death Eaters, none of our people, no one I recognized-- only Parisian wizards and witches hurrying about their business. They seemed nervous-- the woman glancing over her shoulder, the man pulling his sleeves down over his hands-- but I could glean nothing else from the images, and finally Lupin covered the Pensieve.

"I will see what I may learn from the sky," said Firenze. "It is a night of omens."

"Oh, yes, good heavens, it's the Perseid storm already." Minerva sighed heavily. "I keep forgetting that the year just keeps going on. It feels like time's been stopped here since April."

Firenze begged her for a look at the damnable map, found an open route to the Astronomy tower, and clattered out the door; Lupin followed with the Pensieve in his arms. Minerva sat across the table from me and watched me cast a heating charm on my now-cold dinner and silently fork ratatouille into my mouth. Everything on the plate seemed to have come from Longbottom's gardens.

"Severus. That spell-- you know the one," she said, and I did.

I laid my knife and fork down; they rang loudly against my plate. "What about it?"

"I-- and the Order-- have been saying all along that the time isn't right." She looked at me over the tops of her glasses; without the black squares framing them, her eyes were large and liquid. "That may change."

"I know," I said. "I've made preparations."

She pressed her lips together and reached for my hand, and I let her take it.

When I returned to the laboratory, I stood in the doorway for a long time without announcing myself, watching Millicent Bulstrode prepare reduced Wolfsbane for its week-long simmering.

An elderly warlock glanced up from chopping woundwort and cleared his throat, and without looking away from her work, Bulstrode said "Professor? Am I doing something wrong?"

"No," I said. "No, you're not." I watched her cover the cauldron and set it over a low flame. "Now show me how you would prepare a Sanguination Draught," I said. "Explain each stage to me, as though I were a second-year."

I made her walk me through four potions before I heard Potter's footsteps in the corridor. Her work was flawless. Her explanations were simplistic, reductive, largely monosyllabic-- a child could have understood them. I helped her bottle and store the night's work. "Well done, Miss Bulstrode," I said. "Good night."

Bulstrode cocked her head at me; on her, the expression called to mind a contemplative mastiff. "Finch-Fletchley reckons you really care for him," she said.

There was no point asking who she meant by _him_. "Mr. Finch-Fletchley's speculations are of no interest to me, Miss Bulstrode."

"Hardly speculation." At my look of puzzlement, she elaborated, "You didn't know they dated? Anyway," she said, "Finch-Fletchley said he didn't think anyone would put up with Potter longer than a week unless they really cared for him."

"How long did Finch-Fletchley put up with him?" I asked, but Bulstrode didn't know.

I thought of asking Potter; he would have told me anything I wanted to know about his old amours. But when I came into the dim bedroom, he was lying on the bed with his arms and legs spread wide, naked except for his glasses, skin luminous in the square of light from the doorway; the thought of Finch-Fletchley or anyone else seeing him like that filled me with a jealousy I knew was absurd, but was no less intense for that. I smoothed my robes to keep from clenching my fists.

"C'mere." Potter beckoned without looking at me. "Take a look." He pointed upward, smiling.

Stars winked from the ceiling; as I watched, a meteor streaked over my head, seeming to land behind the wardrobe. "Firenze showed me how," said Potter. "It's the same spell as in the Great Hall. Except temporary," he added, finally lifting his head from the pillow. He smiled again, more shyly, at me. "Come on," he said. "Lie down and watch the shower."

I stripped off my clothes and lay beside him. For a moment, I saw only stars, and the Milky Way strung between the bedposts; then, a meteor blazed out of Perseus and across the starfield. Its trail hung in the sky behind it, blue slowly fading to white and gone. Potter found my hand and squeezed it. "Make a wish," he said.

I was bound to be disappointed in anything I wished for. Anything, save one: I rolled over and straddled Potter and looked down into his face. "Keep your eyes open," I said. "Keep watching."

He did; he stared above my head with his eyes wide open, while I pinned his hands above his head and kissed his neck and shoulders until he was jerking and twitching his hips, trying to thrust up against me. I held his wrists in one hand and his prick in the other and stroked it, slow and firm and slick with lube, until it leapt and spat in my hand with every touch, and his eyelids fluttered and almost closed. And then I worked myself open on my still-slick fingers, and held him down, wrists and shoulder and hips, while I sank down onto him and rode him, slowly, and watched the shooting stars reflected in his glasses and his eyes.

~*~

We were awakened early in the morning by Bill Weasley's magically-amplified voice, summoning the Order to the North Tower. The return Portkey had arrived from Charlie Weasley in Romania.

Potter and I were the last to arrive-- the dungeons were a long walk from the Divination classroom, and the staircases were not in our favor -- and by the time we arrived, Kingsley had read the enclosed clippings from _L'Enchant-heure_ and _L'Hebdomagique_ and even the Muggle press, and worked out as complete a version as he could of the last few days' events.

The Dark Lord's forces had stormed the tavern in Calais and swept down the Cul-de-Sac, routing the Aurors and volunteers mustering there. The melee had erupted out into the Muggle streets, and though Obliviators had hurried to the scene, they could not find all the witnesses in time to keep it from the notice of the Muggle press, and the Muggle police.

Captives had been taken; most were now dead, but at least accounted for. Some had been found in several pieces. From someone, by some means, the Death Eaters had learned where the Committee met in Paris, and how they communicated with Hogwarts. From Calais, a smaller force had gone on to Paris, with Mundungus Fletcher as a hostage, and staged an impromptu attack on the Committee's meeting with _Ministère_ officials. The Portkey had been seized, Fletcher and the French Undersecretary for International Wizarding Affairs killed, and the explosive we had contained the previous day sent back with the Portkey. But the rest of the Committee had escaped, and the rout at Calais had had relatively few casualties, and the survivors-- ground forces under Olympe Maxime, and broom troops under Viktor Krum-- were regrouping at the dragon sanctuary; and the dragon-keepers were arming for war.

Will come to your aid as soon as dragon flight time permits, Weasley wrote. _Expect us at dawn on 15 August. _

In less than forty-eight hours, the cavalry was coming: by air, across nearly the whole of Europe, in broad daylight, with forty dragons, the cavalry was coming.

The implications for wizarding secrecy were staggering, but we did not pause to consider them.

The rest of that day passed in feverish activity. I hauled out every student cauldron in the storerooms and sent Theodore Nott upstairs to scour the Great Hall for recruits; in half an hour, the classroom, my private workroom, and two side dungeons had been set up assembly-line fashion to brew incendiary potions and Vapor of Oblivion, and seal them-- the second liquefied under high pressure-- into every bit of glassware the laboratories and kitchens could produce.

While we worked, Granger came by to check and renew the dungeon wards. Every door on the level of the potions classroom was primed to take an Impermeable Charm, in case of some serious mishap in the laboratory; Granger recast the charms methodically, and ticked each door off on a copy of Potter's map. Five minutes later, she was followed by Hippolyta Grubbly-Plank and four fifth-year boys-- one from each house-- who were methodically boarding up and bricking over the dungeons few windows. I opened my quarters so they could seal the window in my sitting room, and Malcolm Baddock led them up into the Slytherin dormitories.

Unprompted, Nott brought a second shift of potions workers in for the afternoon, and shooed the departing shift up to the Great Hall to eat. It was sensible thinking on his part-- the first group had begun to flag-- but it meant fifty new pairs of hands to instruct and supervise. I had managed to get the line moving again, at a nearly satisfactory speed, when Potter appeared in the doorway, straddling his broom, his toes barely brushing the ground. "Professor!" he called. "Meeting in the North Tower. Come on."

I glanced around the room-- all three of my assistants were there, as well as two industrial brewers and an alchemical hobbyist of some repute. "Bulstrode," I said, "you are in charge of this laboratory." I didn't add _until my return_, just stripped off my dragonhide gloves and set them on the bench beside her, though I knew they would be too small for her massive hands.

She counted another two widdershins stirs of her cauldron before she picked them up, though she did not put them on. "I won't disappoint you, Professor."

"See that you don't." I said it without malice.

Potter slid forward onto his broom to make room for me. "Do you want this pasty now, or do you need both hands?"

I hadn't eaten lunch-- or breakfast, for that matter. "Give me that."

"I have no idea what's in it," he said, and kicked off down the corridor. "Molly wants every bit of food in the castle in portable form-- she's got the house-elves making hundreds of those."

The pasty was filled with potatoes and last night's ratatouille, still warm. I ate it so quickly I nearly lost it again when Potter shot us through the entrance hall and up the main stairwell. I held onto his waist and forced myself to keep my eyes open: The hallways were torchlit, every window bricked over; the staircases were swiveling away from their landings, or dropping stairs from their middles. We were not the only broom traffic-- wizards and witches of all ages flew down the corridors, levitating ladders and nets and sloshing cauldrons ahead of them; paper airplanes and owls darted around their heads.

Potter flew us up the north stairs and out into the afternoon sun, above the inner curtain walkway. From outside, glamours glinted and reflected over every bricked-up window; from the camp, or even the outer curtain, the castle would look unchanged. But within-- I looked down into Longbottom's garden; a dozen wizards leaned out between the traceries of the fifth-floor gallery, levitating an immense net over the roofless shaft as a sort of velarium. "_Solidus_ on the count of three," one called, as we flew back inside.

Even on the eve of battle, the Order could argue for hours. Some few things, we could agree on quickly enough-- Moody wanted more men guarding the ward lacunae; Lupin, more guards on the entrances to the collapsed and walled-off secret passages into the castle, now no longer secret. Molly Weasley had simply gone ahead with her own preparations, moving food stores into caches all throughout the castle and recruiting a battalion of elderly witches to sew or transfigure uniforms of sorts for Hogwarts's defenders-- large square bandanas striped in the colors of each house, green, yellow, red, and blue. They were ugly things, but they would tell friend from foe in the battle, and we tied them on solemnly. Potter bound his around his head, to lift his fringe out of his face; with his black hair sticking straight up above it and his scar showing red and livid below, he looked like a guerilla fighter, which I supposed he was, in a way.

Strategy, though, we could debate for hours, and did. Shacklebolt unrolled a vast map of Hogwarts and environs, and the twins drew three intersecting arcs across it, showing the area the artillery could bombard, and Tonks cut a chain of paper dolls representing foot soldiers and fliers and scattered them over the map. Four hours later, the dolls had torn each other to shreds, and we still had no better plan than to wait for opportunities the Dark Lord's army might never give us.

Minerva looked up from the carnage. "Severus," she said, as I put a feebly twitching doll out of its misery with a rip to the neck, "do you have... preparations... you need to make?"

I crumpled the doll in my fist. "Yes," I said. "I have." I stood up and nodded to Potter and Granger, and we all made to leave. I stopped by Minerva's chair, close enough that only she could see my face when I bent down. "I will see you in the morning."

She nodded, soberly. "In your own good time, Severus."

I sent Potter and Granger running to fetch Weasley and Longbottom, and they all converged on my sitting-room more or less at once, Longbottom levitating two dwarf orange trees in terra cotta pots. "To practice on," he said.

I had merely planned to sacrifice my chairs. But the trees were as lush as anything in Longbottom's garden, the round hothouse oranges bending the branches with their weight; they would make for a much better essay in the curse. I cleared a place for the pots, and Longbottom and Weasley set the little trees up in the center of the room, and leveled their wands at them and uttered the curse: "_Absumo_."

Both trees fluttered, as if in a breeze; for a few seconds, there was no other mark on them. Then the leaves of Weasley's tree began to wither, curling up from the edges and turning brown and dry. The oranges lost their color, shriveled, and fell.

Longbottom's tree, meanwhile, showed no outward signs the curse had even touched it; but when he lowered his wand, it quivered and collapsed in on itself, completely hollow inside its dry, brittle bark.

I supposed it only stood to reason that Longbottom's successes would be as spectacular as his failures.

"Excellent work, Mr. Longbottom," I said. "Should you grow tired of mucking about in the dirt, you could have a brilliant career in the dark arts." Longbottom blanched a little, but all he said was "Thank you, sir."

I snapped a branch off Weasley's tree, scattering dry leaves to the carpet. It, too, was hollow inside, though an uneven skin of wood remained inside the bark. "It will do, Mr. Weasley."

Potter knelt down and sifted what was left of the tree Longbottom had reduced to dust. "We'll need a signal," he said. "For when it's time."

"I-- I've thought of that already," said Granger. She dug into her pocket and drew out a handful of gold Galleons, and pressed them without explanation into the others' hands. To me, she said "They're charmed to get hot when the signal is given. And you can signal with any of them; just tap it with your wand."

I tucked mine into an inner breast pocket of my robe. "You've kept one for yourself, I see."

Granger reddened a bit, but her voice was still brisk. "You'll need someone else to be part of this. The spell will take time, and you'll all need to be alive to do it. You'll need me to cover you."

Her back was almost impossibly straight; she held her chin so high I could barely see he eyes. "In that case, Miss Granger, I have something for you." I brought out the coffer where I had locked the globe of Potter's blood. It was still vaporous: a muddy red miasma, boiling inside the glass sphere. I tapped the glass with my wand. "Venenum Purificio." The red intensified, brightened; the vapor shrank in on itself, then boiled out again in a thinner cloud.

"The impurities will have settled out, while it sat in the dark," I said; "I have removed them. Of what remains-- one breath of even a thousandth part of this will kill a grown man, almost instantly. In its pure state, it shouldn't cause lingering death; anyone who survives getting a lungful long enough to worry about it ought to live." I offered her the glass; she took it. "I trust you to know when such a weapon is appropriate, and to use it when it is."

She closed both hands around it. "I will."

I had had my fill of speculation about what the morning would bring, but Weasley and Longbottom had not been present for the meeting, and they demanded details from Potter. But he, too, seemed to have little taste for the topic, and once he'd answered their most specific questions-- how many foot troops were coming with the dragons, how many air, how many trained Aurors and world-class fliers, and was Viktor Krum really leading the broom forces?-- his conversation turned to reminiscences I could not share. I busied myself putting together a file of the Slytherin house passwords and student records, the things the next head of house would need to know first, and did my best to ignore Potter and his friends. Granger's voice became progressively more choked, and I half expected Potter to shepherd them all away, out of my quarters, back to Gryffindor-- but then my clock chimed nine, and Granger jumped to her feet.

"It'll be getting dark," she said. "I need to see if there's a Mark." She kissed Potter's cheek. "Good night, Harry. I-- I'll see you in the morning." She took Weasley's hand while Weasley made his own farewells and nearly towed him out the door, no doubt to burst into tears as soon as she was out of Potter's earshot.

Longbottom looked sadly after her and followed, muttering something about Parvati worrying.

And we were left alone.

"Thanks," said Potter.

"What on earth for?"

He shrugged. "A lot, really. But mostly letting Hermione have a part in this. You're right, you know; she will know when to use that. Better than I would, I know that."

I rolled up my bundle of scrolls and tied them up in green. "Miss Granger has a gift for ruthlessness. It should have been better cultivated."

Potter nodded, abstractedly, then turned it into a sudden shake of his head. "She-- no." He scraped his fingernails through the flock of his chair arm. "Why are we talking about Hermione from all the way across the room, when tomorrow night we'll be-- we'll be waiting for the reinforcements to come and, and why aren't you touching me?"

No sooner had he said it than it was a lie: I was on him in a second, touching him everywhere I could, tugging at the fastenings of his robe and treading on its hem in my haste to have him naked, in my bed.

I was no less hasty once he was there, but I fought my haste, held back from my own need while I kissed and bit his neck, not caring about the marks I left; while I pulled him tight against me, his back to my chest, his legs snarled up in mine, in the sheets. I fucked him, deep and without finesse, with no goal but to feel him tight around every inch of me. He came twice around me, before I could finally hold back no more and rolled him onto his stomach and gasped out my orgasm against his neck; but after I had shuddered to the end of it and pulled out of him, I did not let him be. I made him come again, on my hands, and again, until he had nothing left to give, until he batted my hands away from his tender prick and whimpered at the touch of one grasping finger inside him. The whimpers turned to moans, and then to words-- _fuck me, fuck me_\-- but I didn't understand until he seized my prick, and I suddenly felt how hard I was, again. I slid into his body one last time-- he was even hotter and tighter than before-- and held him tight against my body, panting into his hair, feeling his skin and his sweat and his heartbeat fast against my chest. I held him for a long, long time before I began to rock us together, too quick and yet as slowly as I could, trying to hold off the dawn.

~*~

I woke to a low, distant rumble, like the thrum of a faraway train. Potter sat up when I did, instantly awake, and listened. "Artillery?"

I swung my feet onto the floor, and the noise seemed instantly louder; the castle's foundations were shaking. "Sappers."

Potter flung open the wardrobe doors. I dressed quickly: the Galleon in my pocket, my wand in my sleeve, my hair tied back and the bandana knotted around my neck. I wore robes-- I scarcely knew how to move in anything else-- a linen gown and an outer robe full of pockets, with protection charms spun and woven into the fabric. Potter frowned at his school robe and tossed it aside; in his ragged denim trousers, he looked even more like he should have been crawling through a swamp with a knife in his teeth. He shrank his broom to half-size and slung it across his back.

We stood inside the door for several tense seconds, listening to the noise rumbling up through the floor, and to the answering groans that sounded from higher in the castle-- it sounded like the rubble barricades and the _Aporeo_ charms were holding, for now. A burst of louder noise gave way to silence-- the silence held-- and I reached for the deadbolt, but Potter barred me with an arm across the door. "Wait," he said, and pressed me against the jamb. "For luck." He kissed me as though he could climb into my mouth, inside my skin, and stay there. I tried to get a fistful of his hair, to hold his head just so, just there, but my hands only skidded over the tight-knotted bandana; I couldn't hold onto him. When we broke apart, I could feel my pulse beating fast in my lips, stronger there than in my hands, or my throat, or my heart.

Potter swallowed; he was breathing hard. He opened the door. "After you."

A paper airplane jabbed me in the back of the neck as soon as I stepped outside. I unfolded it: _North Tower_, it read. _Inside routes only_. Potter flew us there, though cutting out the shortcut along the inner courtyard forced him to fly up a spiral staircase that was far too narrow for the exercise, though it didn't seem to faze Potter. The corridors were bustling with foot and broom traffic, as before, but this morning, there was no noise: everyone was silent, listening to the work of the sappers. Striped bandanas blazed from every throat or brow or arm.

The North Tower windows had not been bricked up; I hated myself for feeling so exposed when I stepped into their light. All the resident Order members, and a good dozen others besides, were packed into the room, mostly clustered around the table, where the map of Hogwarts was now a three-dimensional model. Paper-doll armies were arrayed around the outer curtain; the Dark Mark was inked on each white breast.

Granger passed a scroll of parchment to Potter. "Last night's plaintext," she said, and he unrolled it and let me read over his shoulder: _Dragons and known Order members/sympathizers scried over Hungary on northwest heading; sighting confirmed by Muggle press. Sappers working from Honeydukes and Shrieking Shack. Camp on move, will advance on castle by dawn. Best of luck. _

"They started with the heavy blasting an hour ago; there was one attempt to get through the weak spot in the trophy room wards, too, but the sentries managed to repel it," she said. "They're almost right around the castle, now, though; look." She nodded to the nearest window. I looked out around the shutter: far below, a long, ragged line of robed backs and hooded heads was ranged fifty yards or so behind the earthen dike and wooden pale of the outer curtain. Dark pockmarks in the grass showed where the artillery had driven them back. As I watched, a few men advanced at a run, and an incendiary hurtled through the air toward them. But the rearguard got off a few Flame-Freezing charms, halting the explosion; some men fell back, and a few fell; but some, when the smoke cleared, had gained the shelter of the wall.

One of the Weasley twins-- George-- peered outside over my shoulder. "Snape, you know how to handle volatiles; we need you on the Owlery tower arming potion bombs. Come on, I'll fly you up."

And so I saw the battle begin from high above, while I thrust fuses through the corks of beer bottles and laboratory glassware and cast pressure charms and slow-burning _Conflagro_s. Shacklebolt and the Weasley twins had their engines-- three well-balanced ballistae, responsive to the slightest wave of a wand-- set up on the Owlery, West, and Astronomy towers, with caches of ammunition below; the owls had been taken down to the dungeons, save for fifty or so on message duty within the castle. Potter's big snowy perched atop a machicolation and watched us stonily while we laid down a barrage of incendiaries just outside the outer curtain. Under its cover, Moody led a troop out to the wall.

On its other side, a group of Voldemort's soldiers approached the edge of the bombardment zone. All at once, the vanguard put up an overlapping phalanx of Shield Charms; I could see the shimmer in the air above them. But Moody's eye had seen it too, through the palings, and as the Dark Army swarmed the earthen wall, he signaled to the tower with blue sparks. I primed a flask of Vapor of Oblivion and passed it to one of Weasley's helpers; below, Moody's troops raised their bandanas over their faces.

The bomb fell and broke in a cloud of blue steam; the whole Dark company fell Stunned, half over the wall and half behind it. Moody's people, breathing through their filter charms, surged forward into the vapor, wands pointed at the ground. The ground swelled beneath them, and a great wave of earth suddenly heaved up, swirled and eddied in the air, and fell again over the unconscious bodies of the wizards.

The eddying motion was unmistakable: it was Sepultus Vivens, as Dark a charm as only Moody could use without some feeling of irony, but a good choice; the earth would let the buried men breathe, but be no harder to shift for its admixture of air.

But it gave the Dark Lord, or whichever of his lieutenants stood white-masked, directing hexes into the clearing blue smoke, an idea; the earth behind Moody's troop began to open up-- slowly, reluctantly, the soil of Hogwarts loath to help its attackers-- but fissures opened all the same, deep ones, and those few wizards who fell were entirely swallowed. We let fly another stun bomb, but the trick could only work once; the Dark soldiers were all sporting Bubble-head charms or filter charms of their own when it hit. And we did not dare send incendiaries into the midst of our own people, though we bombarded as close to them, and to the wall, as we dared. We felled some. Others fled ahead of the fires, across the closing fissures, and though the fight, hand-to-hand and wand-to-wand now, was close, they were gaining ground, pressing Moody's troop farther and farther back toward the castle. One long section of wall was theirs.

We had far too few skilled archers. The few who knew the art-- Flitwick, Bill Weasley, the Grubbly-Plank woman, others I did not know-- had been teaching it to volunteers for weeks, but even with aiming charms and the twins' attempt at Easy-Draw Strings, few of them had the range or the aim to do more than rain showers of arrows indiscriminately, in a broad stripe just inside the artillery's zone of bombardment. As our own people were pushed back, one by one, the companies of archers halted their barrages, until only the few sharpshooters still let fly; and their arrows rebounded harmlessly off shield charms.

The Dark troop had found a pocket of safety: inside the reach of the artillery, with all the engines calibrated as they were, and outside the reach of all but the most powerful hexes. Far across the lawns, I could see knots of men in other such pockets. They could not hit the castle with anything dangerous, but they could easily shield against anything we threw at them at such a distance.

Moody had seen something in the center of the scrum, was throwing his men against the bristling hedge of wands; but though men fell, stunned or worse, on either side, the activity in the middle did not halt. "_Dirigo_ on three," Weasley shouted, launched an incendiary randomly in the direction of the melee, and all of us on the tower drew our wands and pressed on it in midair, directing it to the space they had suddenly cleared. A few saw the bomb, whipped out Flame-Freezing charms; the incendiary exploded, on target, but still a few spans shy of the siege engine that they had constructed from Reduced and hidden parts. Some flames escaped the charm; there was a flurry as men stamped out fires in robes and hair and grass, and beat away sparks catching the surface of the engine; many fell to Moody's troop. But Moody's people were still far fewer when the smoke cleared; and the Dark soldiers reformed their wand-hedge, tighter and closer, around their trebuchet.

The masked Death Eater sloshed something from a wineskin into the sling on the trebuchet's arm and ignited it; it flew at a high angle, just over the curtain wall. I heard screams and cries from below.

After that, the air was so full of fire and smoke, I doubted anyone but Moody saw clearly how the battle went. I saw a second company of defenders run out from the north postern; I saw a gap open in the outer curtain, and Dark soldiers rush through it from either side; I saw other siege engines set up and Engorged on the lawns. Twice, I felt the pain behind my Mark that told me Death Eaters had died.

We took out one catapult; we scattered two more companies before they could set their engines up. Our supply of glassware had not given out, and even if it did, Bulstrode could keep the potions coming almost indefinitely. They could not set up artillery any faster than we could strike it down; the few engines they could maintain had chased the defenders from a few short stretches of castle wall, but they were no threat to the castle, not while our own artillery held.

Weasley grinned. "We're holding out. They can throw all they want at the walls; we're holding out."

That was when the first flier appeared.

I shot him down. Weasley dropped the second. Greater numbers, we could not defend against and still keep up the artillery barrage. I turned to send the owl for help and found her gone; but where she had been, four fliers in striped bandanas crested the tower ramparts. None of them was Potter.

The dogfight raged around the tower, fliers dodging bombs from above and below. The Hogwarts fliers defended our emplacement fearlessly and skillfully-- for how long, I did not know; my awareness had shrunk to bombs and fuses and the occasional _Dirigo_.

I did not see the Death Eater until he was upon us.

He came down, out of the zenith with his robes already alight, a man-shaped meteor aimed straight at the ballista. I threw an incendiary at him and missed; two hexes caught him, but he was right above the emplacement, falling fast, and though my charm or George Weasley's might have slowed him, nothing could have stopped him striking the tower.

Whatever was concealed in his robes exploded on impact. I didn't know if I was thrown from the tower, or if I jumped; I only knew that one moment I was falling, my own robes blazing, and the next moment Leonard Lovegood had me by my throbbing left arm, and had doused the flames with a jet of water. I looked behind me-- the top of the Owlery tower was blown open. Of Weasley, his other helpers, or the Death Eater, there was no sign. I could already see the Dark Lord's forces thronging across the lawns; a third of the castle wall had no artillery defenses now, and though the arrows and hexes flung from the castle felled many men, they could not halt the Dark Army's advance.

Lovegood pulled me up behind him on the broom, and dived down through the clearing smoke into the staircase that now gaped open at the top of the broken Owlery tower. "Report?" I gasped.

"The foot troops retreated back to the castle. The outer wall's all You-Know-Who's now; they've brought up a battalion of trolls to man it, no one knows where from. But the dragons are bringing a squadron of Muggle aeroplanes with them, so that might just shift the balance."

Of course, I'd had to be rescued by the one man in Hogwarts who'd been raving even before the battle started.

Lovegood flew us back to the North Tower, and for a few hours, there was a lull, of sorts. The Dark Army kept lobbing fireballs, bubbles of Garroting Gas, whatever they could throw from a trebuchet, over the few open sections of wall. But they did not bring down the other artillery emplacements; after the first suicide attack, Minerva and Molly Weasley had sent fliers up with curtains and fishing nets, charmed with Solidus and Impenetrable like the velaria over the courtyards; they had hung them from disarmed Bludgers and anything else that could take and hold a Hover Charm, to make light, movable screens to shield the ballistae. The screens and the fliers together kept the emplacements secure; and with the artillery in place, the Dark Army could not gain ground to attack any more of the castle walls, except with foot and broom soldiers. We evacuated the few parts of the castle in danger from enemy artillery, and sealed the doors. The air was still thick with smoke and bombs and brooms, and the Dark Lord's soldiers still crashed like waves on the castle walls, and like waves fell back again and retreated, but it was a stalemate.

Below the castle, meanwhile, was a deceptive calm. Lupin had led a party out to the Whomping Willow and destroyed the tree and the tunnel mouth, collapsing the whole passage onto the heads of the sappers. The other tunnel, the one into Honeydukes' basement, we could not bring down so decisively without risking the collapse of several load-bearing walls in the castle itself. I was in the party that waited in the tunnel mouth itself, behind the humpbacked statue where I had once caught Potter sneaking into the castle, listening to the sounds behind the newly-laid brick wall grow louder and louder, nearer and nearer.

Lupin scraped at a chink in the brick with his wand, quietly as he could. "Good enough?" he whispered.

I silently held up the blacksmith's bellows the house-elves had unearthed from Merlin alone knew where and let him see the size of its neck for himself. He scraped another fingernail's thickness of mortar and brick dust from the hole. "Get it ready."

I funneled liquefied Vapor of Oblivion-- a whole cauldronful, that Bulstrode had hit with a Chilling Charm-- into the bellows, and sealed the brass neck with Impenetrable. I wedged the neck through the chink in the brick, almost silently-- Lupin held the bellows-- and cast a quick warming charm; the bellows expanded in Lupin's hands. The rest of our party-- four men off the sentry rota, all wearing their bandanas over much-abused Ravenclaw Quidditch jerseys-- shifted their grips on their wands. From the second cauldron Bulstrode had sent, I spooned a decoction of beeswax and kelpie saliva to seal the chink against leaks.

The sounds of the sappers-- muffled explosions, rockfalls, scraping and grinding of rock on rock-- came nearer, and nearer, until at last we heard the tap of a wand against the brick. Lupin nodded and got a grip on the bellows handles. "Stand back," I mouthed, and touched my wand to the brass neck, where it entered the wall. "_Finite Incantatem_," I whispered.

Lupin squeezed, though he almost needn't have; the vapor was under great pressure, and rushed out of the bellows fast enough to pull Lupin's arms together. From behind the wall, I heard a thud, then another, a third, a fourth--

"How many people did they have back there?" asked one of the Ravenclaws.

"Be glad they sent so many," said Lupin. "No one else can come through until they're pulled out of there."

"The gas won't lose its effect for a good six hours," I said. "If you must remove the bellows before then, cast a Bubble-head or a filter charm, but I don't recommend it unless you hear bodies being dragged out. If that happens, summon me or anyone from the potions lab; in the meantime, you'll at least have a clear shot through the chink."

And then I and Lupin left the old Quidditch teammates to guard the tunnel and returned to the North Tower. In this, we were unconscionably foolish.

We knew there was no room for another man to crawl down the tunnel and drag out his unconscious comrades. We knew there had to be too much debris in the passage to make levitating them out an easy proposition. But we forgot that there might be a crevice, no wider than the neck of the bellows, no wider than the chink in the brick, still open between the sappers' bodies and the rock-- a crevice just wide enough for a half-starved rat.

A rat with a Bubble-head charm, most likely. He must have looked very foolish.

We didn't see him emerge. It would have taken him time to crawl down the passage; perhaps he had to clear his way as he went. It was hours-- past nightfall-- before we felt the blast from the third floor.

The battle had calmed; our artillery and theirs still exchanged fire, lighting up the sky, but most of the Dark Lord's ground troops had fallen back, retrenched in the pockets of safety on the West Lawn, and behind the western section of the outer curtain. The lawn outside the front doors was churned into nothing but clods and loose soil; we had stopped bombardment with incendiaries when we saw the enemy taking advantage of the cratered ground to dig trenches into the grass. I was back in the laboratory; we were preparing Garroting Gas, Greek fire, Convulsulum, anything that might drive back the men without tearing them any further shelter in the earth, though the runners told us that they were still extending their trenches with spells, slowly.

The blast rocked the castle, but I didn't leave the laboratory until Neville Longbottom appeared at the door and said, "Sir, come quick, they're setting up the siege cauldrons."

"What's happened?" I followed him out into the corridor. "Have they reached the front gates?" The siege cauldrons were tremendous iron things, hardly used in Hogwarts's long history, for boiling water or oil or even nastier things to rain down on attackers.

"Not yet," he panted, "but they're getting nearer; we went ahead and bombed out the trench, and Moody buried a lot of them under about four feet of soil, but they're still coming; they don't seem to care how many casualties it costs them."

We ran out into the entrance hall; Minerva and Molly had set up tall iron tripods on the narrow ledge over the great front doors, next to the gaping murder holes, and twenty wizards were levitating a cauldron up into place. The second one was already hanging on chains from its tripod, over a cold blue fuelless fire. From it rose a smell of burning trees.

"Oh, Severus, there you are," said Minerva. "None of our heating charms seem to scale up this far; that pitch is still hours from boiling at this rate."

I got the pitch to boiling, though it spattered and burnt my hair and Molly's robes. "Where's Filius? Surely he--"

"We don't know; that whole half of the castle is locked down, and none of the runners I've sent are back yet. I connected the internal Floo up once, but I nearly got Stunned right through the fire; someone's blasting up a storm in there. I'm wondering if they haven't scaled the walls in the evacuated section, or--"

The sound of close-quarters wand combat was suddenly audible, drifting down the stairwell. Molly quietly beckoned a few witches up to the gallery to tend the cauldrons-- Eiluned Dearborn Grimstone took the long-handled ladle from me--and Minerva, Longbottom and I took up positions at the base of the marble stair, waiting with our wands drawn. People came from the Great Hall and fell into ranks behind us.

The fight-- the melee-- drew nearer. Curses flew thick and fast; doors slammed; we heard the cracks of breaking glass and wood and the duller thuds of bodies falling onto stone. A white-masked Death Eater appeared, teetering on the third-floor landing, and fell senseless at our feet. And then with a clatter the fight was upon us: Granger and Lupin ran down the stairs, flinging curses over their shoulders at five wizards and a witch-- men and women I recognized, followers of the Dark Lord-- and at their head, another white-masked man, who held his wand in a gleaming silver hand.

We'd underestimated Pettigrew again.

There was another clatter of heels on the stairs; black robes and white masks, and a knot of our own folk in pursuit, stripes blazing at their throats. And then for a few minutes, there was nothing in my sight but bodies spinning, and curses flying; no room to think about the hundreds of attackers just outside the door, only about this man and his wand, that woman and her fists, and how to protect myself.

The doors resounded, and then shook with an even louder noise: the fight had reached our doorstep. The great bar across the doors held steady; it was imbued with charms of locking and warding and protection. But half those charms would lift when it did...

Too late, too late, I saw Pettigrew's intent-- to fight his way to the doors, and calmly lift the latch for his master. He was almost there; two of the Dark Lord's followers lay insensible, covered in pitch, beneath the murder hole, but that was another trick that would only work once. I stunned a man, stunned two people, turned and tried to cast the widest spell I could, not caring who I hit, just keeping the doorway clear-- I saw the flash of blue and heard myself shout "Stun bomb!" before I'd even quite recognized it as one of ours, an unexploded flask of Vapor of Oblivion with one of my own fuses in it-- I pulled my bandana up over my face, almost too late; I fell, half-senseless, breathing hard through the smooth cloth, and tried vainly to lift my head, to pull myself to my feet--

I looked up; the smoke cleared just enough to let me see Pettigrew lift the bar from the doors. I shot, but my hex went awry. Pettigrew sheltered behind his fallen men. I fired off another hex, closer to the mark this time, and another bolt of red came over my shoulder and followed it; pitch spattered down through the murder hole. A few of my comrades were picking themselves up-- Granger was breathing easily inside her air bubble, and Lupin--

The doors shuddered. I leveled my wand and climbed to my feet. They groaned and twisted on their hinges, and then burst: I only just cast a shield charm in time to save me from the hail of splinters, the granite shrapnel, the spattering pitch as the gallery cracked and fell. Through the dust, through the pale dawn light that streamed through the broken doorway, a tall, robed figure moved. He stepped delicately over the pitch-smeared bodies, between the fallen slabs of stone, over the threshold of Hogwarts Castle: Lord Voldemort had come.

Someone fired off a shot; the bolt seemed to slide over him, and into nothingness. He waved his hand, not even his wand hand, and from the direction it had come there came a choked cry, then silence. I did not turn around to see who had fallen.

The Dark Lord surveyed the wreckage of the Hall through his slitted red eyes. Behind me, I was aware of people climbing to their feet, of Longbottom brushing the dust from his robes.

The Galleon in my breast pocket suddenly burned, insistent as the Dark Mark-- and the Dark Lord's eyes slid over mine like a searchlight, looked me up and down as though he could see the coin above my heart, could see it branding me.

"Severus," he said. "I have missed you."

I took a step backward, hating myself for it, though it was one step nearer the dungeon stairs. Now I could see Granger reaching into her pocket, shaping something round in her fist.

"Have you?" One more step; by the doorway, Minerva rose to her knees and reached under Mrs. Grimstone's body, coming up with an intact wand. "I had the impression you had had quite enough of my company, the last time we met." I thought I heard a whisper of air, the rustle of a broom, far above me.

"But I should never have been so harsh." He smiled at me, and though it turned my stomach, there was enough of the man he had been in that smile to remind me why I had followed him. "Any king will be beset by spies and traitors, drawn to power like moths to the flame. And if I must be so beset-- well." He stepped fully into the hall, so that I could see he was unbloodied, untouched, even his robes immaculate. "You made a much more entertaining traitor than young Malfoy." I swallowed; I wondered if Draco had known, had broken cover to send his last message. "You chose your protégé no better than you chose your new mentor, Severus. And now they are both dead." He drew his wand, held it out as if to admire how the light gleamed on it. "And so shall you be."

The light flickered, again, and went dark-- a great wing covered the doorway, blotting out the sun. The Dark Lord stopped, turned-- I edged toward the stairs-- a great whirling eye glinted at the broken walls. "Minerva! 'Ware!" I shouted, and then everything happened at once: Potter swept down the staircase and pulled me up behind him on his broom, Weasley followed with Longbottom, and dragon-fire billowed through the shattered doorway, breaking around the Dark Lord and buffeting him like a gust of wind-- but no more. He spun around, untouched in the midst of the flame, and in the moment of his inattention Minerva and Lupin were on their feet, and we four on the brooms were almost to the dungeon stairs.

Granger looked over her shoulder after us, for a split second. "Go," she mouthed. When the Dark Lord turned back to the hall, and shrieked a curse after us, her hand was clutched around the ruddy glass.

"Hermione." Weasley's voice was very small.

"Is doing what she needs to," Potter said. He brought us to a halt and palmed my door open before even dismounting. "Get in, quick." Already, we could hear loud blasts from the entrance hall. I bolted the door and sealed it with every locking charm I'd ever used.

And then there was nothing more to do but roll up my sleeve. "Wait," said Potter. He was as stoic as only a Gryffindor could be-- grim, even-- foolish determination crowding everything else out of his face and voice; but his hands shook, just barely, as he yanked the bandana from his head. "Give me your hand. The left." He tied the square of fabric around my upper arm, into a loose slipknot with one tail hanging. "In case you need a tourniquet."

There was no equivalent gesture I could make for Potter; he could not excise his scar. I lifted the fringe from his forehead and touched the burning lines of it. For a moment, I had the urge to lean down and kiss it-- but time was short, and Potter and Weasley had contented themselves with the brief, tight clasp of Weasley's hand on Harry's arm; I should have been ashamed to claim any greater farewell. And so I turned Potter around and stood back to back with him, feeling him tremble against me one last time. Weasley leveled his wand at me. I pressed the tip of my own wand to the bare, livid Mark-- it glowed, red and hot, as it had since the first Death Eater fell-- and said "Get on with it."

Weasley settled his stance and swallowed hard. "_Absumo_."

The hex almost knocked me over-- I fell against Potter and he against me, the two of us keeping each other upright. I stared down at the Mark: the skull grinned back at me, laughing at the charms I mouthed. I could feel the magic flowing through me, reaching deep into the Mark and out through it, riding through me on the back of pain.

It was worse than Cruciatus, because I could not block it out: the pain outlined the conduit, told me where the power came into me, and where it could escape. The pain was my only guide, and I had to focus on it, feel it reaching out all through my body, feel the shocks in my own flesh when, at long last, the Death Eaters began to fall.

If I opened my eyes, I could see the eyes and mouth of the skull running with black blood. So I kept them shut. I was still aware of Potter's solid warmth at my back, but he was dropping, falling to his knees, and I fell, too. But behind the Mark, I felt the Dark Lord's power. It weakened, it wavered-- and his weakness buoyed me up on the tide of pain, kept me conscious, every incremental loss to his strength freeing up another mote of my own power, power I had signed away so long ago I had forgotten how to use it. I cradled my arm, or what was left of it, tight to my chest-- I could not have seen even had I opened my eyes, but I felt the hot, thick blood; I stank of corruption. I clutched my wand hand over the burning core of the brand and poured everything I had-- the pain, the Absumptor that had still not wavered, the power that seemed to be everywhere I looked for it-- into it and through it. A feeling like a wind from a furnace blew through me, out of my wand, between my clutching fingers, and I knew no more.

~*~

I woke to weak light, and low voices, and a steady, throbbing ache in my arm. The pain swaddled the hollow place inside, tender as a rotten tooth, where the raw, worn edges of my magic lay exposed, naked. I lay for a long time, feeling for some trace of another power behind mine, but those connections were gone; there were only my own magic, and pain.

With much effort, I turned my head, lifted it enough to look down the bed. The arm that hurt so much was a phantom; my own arm ended just above the elbow in a caul of white bandages.

I shut my eyes; the pain was still there, and even stronger. I could make it flare if I tried to close my fingers, make it swell and take my breath away if I tried to wave my hand and stretch out my arm. I looked again; there was nothing there.

I clenched my teeth, and thought that I clenched my fist, and breathed deep, and after a while the pain subsided a little, and I struggled to sit up a little and look around me.

"Professor, you're awake." I blinked, and Longbottom was leaning over me.

_How perspicacious of you_, I thought, but all that came out of my mouth was a rattling breath. Longbottom held a glass of water to my lips and let me drink. My throat was very dry. "How long?" I said, when I could speak; it hurt.

"It's the seventeenth. It's morning. You came round for a while yesterday, do you remember?" I didn't. "Madame Pomfrey doubted you would. She also told me not to let you talk too much when you finally woke up; you're very weak, and your throat is still really raw."

I frowned. "What--"

He looked down at me somberly. "You screamed a lot," he said. "Harry, too."

Potter. I squinted beyond Longbottom to the next bed, but the head on the pillow was red, not black. The man's face and body were almost solidly white with bandages; one leg was elevated. Beyond him, every bed in the ward was full.

"That's George," said Longbottom, following my gaze. "They found him halfway down the Owlery stairs, under about three feet of rubble. The healers think he might walk again. Harry's over there." He nodded across the aisle, and I struggled to sit up and look; Longbottom slid an arm under my shoulders and slipped a pillow under me. I was too impatient to protest.

Potter's chest rose and fell under the white sheets. His eyes were shut, and his scar was very red against his skin. His glasses were folded on the table beside him. He had no bandages, no limbs in traction, no mark on his body but the livid scar.

"He's been comatose since I brought him in," said Longbottom.

"Not Weasley?" My voice failed halfway through the name, and Longbottom gave me more water before he answered. "He's all right," he said. "Ron brought you in. He saved your life-- he's the one who bound your arm, and-- well, and cut it off. There wasn't much left," he said apologetically, "and what there was was... spreading." I nodded; Weasley's curse had been strong, and as the other Death Eaters had fallen, the share of its force that came to me had grown too great for me to contain. "We reconnected your Floo. We had to duel right through the fire; some of the Dark Lord's people were still fighting to get at us, and it was a while before the hexes stopped flying-- I'm afraid your sitting-room is kind of torn up-- and then we got you two through to Madame Pomfrey's office."

I owed a life-debt to a Weasley. But it could have been Longbottom, I supposed. "The Dark Lord?"

"Dead," said Neville. "And almost all the Death Eaters, too. The rest of Voldemort's people surrendered; they're prisoners now. The battle's over, Professor."

I had been prepared to live through our defeat. Living to see victory had never seemed a possibility.

I lay with my eyes shut so long that Longbottom must have thought I was asleep, and drew the blanket up to my chin. He flinched and dropped it when I opened my eyes. "Sorry."

"Our people?" I said.

Longbottom didn't have to ask what I meant. "Hermione's dead." I looked away from his stricken face. "Ron's finally asleep; he wouldn't let Madame Pomfrey give him a Dreamless Sleep potion until she was sure that Harry wasn't going to wake up soon, and that George was going to live, and that you were safe. She-- when we finally got the gas cleared, we found her outside your door. There were soldiers and Death Eaters all around her, halfway down the hall on either side. Professor McGonagall told Ron that she must have meant to lead them down where she could trap them, to get away up the side stairs, but they came down the staircase, too; they pinned her right outside your door."

I had not even heard the fight. "Who else?" I said.

It was not so bad as it might have been. Mad-Eye Moody had fallen before the front doors. Filius Flitwick had lost an arm and a leg and an eye holding the Astronomy Tower stairs, and Viktor Krum been shot down defending its artillery emplacement from above. Hippolyta Grubbly-Plank and Griselda Marchbanks had died on the ramparts, hurling curses at the Dark Lord's advancing army.

Then there were the students: Theodore Nott, killed running potion bombs out to the front. Ernie MacMillan, killed collapsing the Honeydukes passage on top of the last of Pettigrew's party, and Dennis Creevey, killed shoring up the wall when it fell. Two slain defending the potions laboratory. Three outside the refugee dormitories. Three in Pettigrew's fight through the corridors. One in the entrance hall; three in the air; four on the ramparts; three on the front lines.

Longbottom did not know yet how many had died in the Dark Lord's service.

~*~

I had many visitors, over the next few days; mostly, they came to see Potter, or Flitwick, or George Weasley, but as none of them were speaking yet, their friends eventually drifted to my bedside. From Minerva, and Lupin, and Shacklebolt, and various Weasleys, I learned how the battle had ended.

Granger, who had renewed the Impermeable spells on the dungeon doors herself, broke the miasma glass in the corridor and kept the enemy from our door while we cursed the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord. Of the Death Eaters, only one survived: Peter Pettigrew, whose talent for self-amputation had already been honed to a fine pitch. He was a prisoner; when we had a Ministry and a Wizengamot again, he would stand trial.

The Death Eaters had died screaming, with the flesh sloughing off their arms and the corruption burning through their veins and scoring black, steaming runnels in its wake. But the Dark Lord had seemed as hale as Longbottom's orange tree, right until his body had begun simply to unravel.

Lupin speculated, and I allowed as he might be right, that as the Dark Lord had built his new body partly on Potter's blood, he could not cut himself off from Potter enough to defend against his attack without destroying that body. But all we knew for certain was what Lupin and Minerva had seen: the Dark Lord, unscathed between spell-fire from before and dragon-fire from behind, suddenly stumbling and falling backwards down the cracked front stairs, and as he fell, his skin shrinking away, his limbs dwindling, his body wasting. He had righted himself on the bottom stair, at the head of the trench, one raw, red fist still clasping his wand, the other scrabbling at the stone-- the size of an infant, the shape of a worm, an embryonic horror with a skull's grinning face.

He had lifted his hand for a final curse, but before he could let it fly, he was struck again. And the dragon fire had burned him, and the massed hexes from the castle doors had sent him flying back into the trench, and whether he died from those, or at the hands of his followers, we would likely never know. There had not been enough left of him to burn, but they had scorched the earth of the trench, and salted it, and filled it in with chalk and stone and ash before covering it over with green turves.

The dragons were still paddocked by the Forbidden Forest, within the bounds of the anti-Muggle wards. The precaution came rather late: they had been seen, flying in broad daylight over a vast swathe of Europe. Photographs of them flying over Prague at daybreak-- Disillusionment charms wavering and falling to show here a scaly talon and a tail, there a rider in streaming robes perched between two vast pinions-- had run in Muggle newspapers the world over, and been talked of on their wireless; the dragons had been expected when they reached the Scottish coast, and had been followed to Hogwarts by a swarm of Muggle light aircraft.

The aircraft had fallen back as they approached the castle grounds, their instruments deadened by the farthest wards; but someone-- we did not know on which side-- had shot down a Muggle hot-air balloon over the lake.

The Liaison Office was making as much out of the dragons as they could-- tying them to every rumor that had spread all summer, trying to make the conspiracy theorists noising about the Ministry bombing, the fighting in the streets of Calais, seem the sort of fools who would be taken in by so transparent a hoax as a flock of obviously false dragons. But it was a losing battle; the covers of _L'Hebdomagique_ and _American Wizardry_ argued over The Coming End of the Secrecy Statute while the quilloed tabloid Leonard Lovegood had put out phrased it rather more conversationally: MUGGLES NOT COMPLETELY UNOBSERVANT AFTER ALL.

After three days, Poppy Pomfrey cut the dosages of most of my healing potions and put me on a weaker painkiller, and an agonizing day after that, I was able to walk down the ward unassisted, and to sit in a chair by Potter's bedside. He had not wakened. Though his skin was almost unmarked, the spell had eaten at his bones and organs; healers still came to his bedside each hour to prod him with their wands and pour potions between his slack lips.

"Do you love him?" Ron Weasley pulled another chair up to the other side of Potter's bed. George Weasley was asleep again; his own potion and spell regimen still kept him heavily drugged.

I looked up from Potter's still face and stared. It was nearly the first thing Weasley had said to me, though he been a constant visitor to the hospital wing, leaving it only to sleep, and then only when Poppy pressed him, and gave him a potion. I supposed it could not have been easy, returning to the bed he had shared with Granger.

Weasley had aged years in the last week. "Do you?" he said again.

"And what if I don't?" I said. "Am I not allowed to grieve him? Will it lessen my regret if he dies, to reflect that after all, I never loved the boy?" I looked back down at Potter's closed eyes. In the fortnight we'd shared a bed, I had never sat up to watch him sleep; I did not know if he had looked any different, worn out by work and sated with pleasure, dreaming. I felt my left hand clench, could have sworn I felt my nails in my palm. "Do you imagine that the work of mourning Granger is yours and yours alone, because only you loved her so deeply?"

His chair scraped on the tiles, and when I looked up I thought he might actually strike me; but then he slumped in his chair, head down, and breathed out in one long sigh, too exhausted for anger. "Fuck," he said to his knees. "Just forget I asked." And, minutes later, "You know, Snape, we're not all as dense as Harry. You don't have to say things the most brutal way possible for the rest of us to get it."

For the rest of the week, Weasley and I kept an almost constant vigil over Potter. Poppy insisted his injuries were healing, bone knitting and flesh mending where we could not see, but he did not wake, not while the ward emptied of all but the most desperate cases, not when the bandages came off Flitwick's face and the splints came off George Weasley's leg, not when Poppy replaced the bandages on my stump with a simple gauze dressing and told me that so long as I came back every day to have it changed, I could sleep in my own bed.

My sitting-room had been spelled halfway to rubble. My bedroom was full of Potter's clothes; the pillows still smelled of his hair. Dreamless Sleep was counterindicated while I was still on the painkillers. I went back to the hospital wing and dozed in a chair by Potter's bedside; halfway down the ward, Weasley was asleep in an empty bed.

When I woke up, Potter's eyes were open. He was watching me in the dim morning light.

"Potter," I said. I reached for his hand-- with both of mine, it felt like-- and held it; he squeezed weakly. "Harry."

He squinted. "I," he started, then screwed up his face in concentration. "Glass."

I thought about this. "Eyeglasses?" I had to let go his hand to pick them up from the bedside table, fumbled my thumb right across the lens, clouding it, while I got them settled on Potter's face. "Is that better?"

He nodded, fervently, and stared intently into my face. "S-- Sev. Severus. What--" he shook his head-- "_who_?"

And that question needed no thought to make sense of; everyone who had woken in the hospital wing had asked the same thing: who was alive, and who dead. "The Dark Lord is dead," I told him, "and all the Death Eaters save Pettigrew." He reached for my hand and held it. "On our side-- Weasley is alive, Longbottom is alive. Minerva. Lupin."

"H-- her--"

I shook my head. "Miss Granger fell covering our retreat."

He tightened his fingers around mine and swallowed, with difficulty; his throat must have been dry. "Do you want water?" He nodded, but didn't release me. "Let go of my hand, and I'll get you some," I said, though I could have pulled away from his grasp easily.

He looked down from my face to the empty sleeve of my robe and swallowed again. "Sorry," he said, and fell back to sleep, without the water, still holding my hand.

~*~

"Severus, you know how much power he had churning through his head. I'm not surprised there's some damage; it's a marvel he's even alive." Poppy traced her wand back down my bare left arm, frowning as it reached the stump. She touched a tender spot, and I flinched. "Does that hurt?"

"Yes, and of course there's _damage_; I asked you if he's going to recover." Potter had been awake for three days, and still he could barely talk. He skipped words, dropped endings, came out with odd substitutions; even so, it seemed to take him a vast effort to speak. He paused and stuttered over all but the simplest words, and names were a particular struggle.

Poppy traced a glowing rune on my skin and frowned at the colors it turned.   
"That depends on how you define recovery," she said. "Harry's aphasia is at least partially the result of injuries to his brain that I can't repair. The burnt-out tissue is gone for good, Severus."

"I see," I said; it felt as though the words squeezed past something cold in my throat. "Potter's finally achieved his lifelong goal of gibbering idiocy. How pleasant to know that practice pays off."

"Aphasia, Severus, not any sort of impairment to his thinking. And I said the _tissue_ was gone, not the abilities-- you've talked to him; he gets things right a lot more than he gets them wrong." She rolled my sleeve back down over the stump and pinned it back in place. "The damage is really very slight and very localized, and the surrounding tissue is healthy; he should learn to compensate."

I tugged the front of my robe straight; there was a trick to doing it one-handed, though I only seemed to manage it once in three tries. "That still sounds like a rather bleak prognosis."

Poppy waited for me to adjust the robe before reaching out to smooth its creases flat. "It's your prognosis too, Severus-- in a way, Harry has the same work ahead of him that you will when youre ready for a prosthesis, and no, I dont know when that will be. He'll have to think hard about things that used to be second nature, until he learns them again-- or maybe for the rest of his life."

Poppy walked out with me from her office into the ward. Weasley sat by Potter's bed, hand on his shoulder, both of them silent.

"People are resilient," she said. "There's very little that we can't learn to accommodate-- if we're not in pain, and grieving, and bone-weary, and half-dead. Give it time."

I took Poppy's reassurances for mere optimism at first, but as she treated Potter's lingering weakness and pain, Potter began to prove her right. A visit from the healers, or even the effort of sitting up, could render him silent, and three times in the next week he suffered crippling headaches that seemed to leave him incapable even of understanding, but when he was rested and free from pain, his conversation was a little closer every day to its former, dismal standard.

But that improvement seemed to be less a matter of healing than of careful rehearsal, of minutes or hours spent planning a short speech or a battery of questions. He wrote more fluently than he spoke, though the effort tired him, and he took to keeping a scroll and quill on his lap constantly, interrupting himself in conversation to scrawl lists of words until he found the right one, or to jot down a word when he remembered it as a reference for later-- _secrecy. casualties. Wizengamot. Wolfsbane. memorial. _

He pulled out different lists when different visitors came to call: questions about prisoners and trials for Lupin, about the responses of the Muggle world and the international wizarding community for Bill Weasley and Arthur. He talked to Molly about funerals; to Longbottom, he asked after his owl.

When Minerva came to visit-- carrying the owl in question on her wrist, for a short visit-- he asked, "When are the NEWTs?"

"September 25," she said crisply. "Though the Ministry will allow you to sit them later if you need to defer them, Potter. You needn't worry about NEWTs until you've recovered your strength."

He nodded, and frowned at his scrap of parchment, but found no help there. "We-- eight-years-- stay. In the school. Staying-- _are_ we staying in the school? Until NEWTs?" He stared Minerva down as he did with everyone, as though challenging her to find anything pitiable in the way he spoke.

Minerva's face did soften, but I knew it had nothing to do with Potter's struggle to frame a sentence. "And after that, too, as long as you're willing to work; there's a lot to be done if we're to start the winter term on time."

This was the first I'd heard of any such plan. "That's only five months away," I said. "You're down six teachers; the castle itself needs at least a year's worth of major structural repairs, and that's not counting the damage to the Quidditch pitch or the greenhouses; you've got Ministry offices working out of half the classrooms and refugees living in the other half and over a hundred prisoners of war awaiting trial in my dungeons--"

"--and how many orphans in the dormitories? How many students dead? It helps nothing to keep the school closed, Severus, no matter how few classes we can offer or how much rebuilding the school still needs. There's work to be done and we won't do it any faster if we close our doors."

"Hear, hear!" called Flitwick, from halfway down the ward; Potter frowned again, and rifled his parchment scraps.

Minerva blushed and turned back to Potter. "I'm sure you'll have plenty of opportunities once you're recovered, Potter, but you're welcome to stay at Hogwarts as long as you like." She held out an arm to Potter's snowy owl, who gave a last nip to Potter's hair and stepped demurely onto Minerva's wrist. "I'll let you get some rest now."

"Professor." Potter struggled to sit up straighter. "Letter-- _letters_? The Hogwarts letters? Gone-- are, have they gone out yet? The Muggle-borns?"

Minerva looked at him keenly. "I think, when you're a little better, Potter, that you and I should talk about that."

~*~

There would be trials, this time; that was the one thing the Ministry were sure of. Or what remained of the Ministry; there was to be a general election to fill the vacant seats in the Wizengamot in September, and until then Amos Diggory, Andromeda Tonks, and Arthur Weasley had formed themselves into an interim ministry, or provisional government, or Gang of Three, depending on which newspaper one read.

I read all of them we could get-- Lovegood's rag, the Daily Prophet (now publishing again, though only a slender ten pages thrice a week), the international papers, even a few Muggle periodicals. I read them to Potter during the first week after he awoke, and after he was well enough to sit up and read them himself, I read silently in my usual chair. Weasley often joined us, swapping sections with Potter and me as we finished them. Without Granger there to feed them what they needed to know, Potter and Weasley read every paper front to back, even to the ads, as if hoping to compensate for a lack of discernment with sheer volume.

By the end of August, I was only in the hospital wing for our daily perusal of the newspapers, and to let Poppy examine my arm. The spell damage to my arm would take weeks yet to heal completely, and I wouldn't be able to start learning to use a prosthetic limb until it had, but I was well enough to stand up over a cauldron for a few hours at a stretch, and there was work to be done-- healing potions, Wolfsbane, everything that had been needed during the long siege. And more-- Bulstrode and I worked every day on a massive batch of Veritaserum, on what was either a Ministry contract or a favor to Arthur Weasley.

Bulstrode had lost her older sister to my spell: Imogen, Slytherin, class of 1993, one of the last Death Eaters to take the Mark before the Dark Lord's end. The rest of her family had fled the country after the siege had begun; they had returned, safe, but as I heard through a fifth-year prefect whose parents knew the Bulstrodes, they blamed Millicent for siding with her sister's killers.

"I would write you an excellent reference," I told her, over the cauldron. I had charmed a glass rod to stir the potion automatically so that I could add verjuice drop by drop; I hated resorting to such a shoddy method, but both Bulstrode's hands were busy grating and pressing heliotrope root. "If you wanted to seek work or training in potions elsewhere."

She shook her head once. "No, thank you, sir."

"Or in some related discipline-- you would do well in alchemy, or healing, or herbology--"

"I'd have asked for a letter if I wanted one, sir." She wrung the cheesecloth bag over a glass measure. "I'd just as soon stay at Hogwarts for a while. Got NEWTs coming up, anyway."

"In that case," I said, and stood back for her to add the heliotrope juice, "have you given any thought to a formal apprenticeship-- here, at Hogwarts? Contingent upon satisfactory NEWT scores, of course."

She poured out the last drops of heliotrope in a steady stream before she looked at me. "You'd want me to help with classes?" she said skeptically.

I shrugged. "I'll need assistance preparing classroom demonstrations for the winter term at least." Privately, I thought it might be much longer than that before I'd mastered brewing with an artificial arm.

She set down the graduated cylinder and wiped her hands on her apron. "I want that round room by the south stairs for my quarters, then," she said, "soon as the sheep are out of it."

~*~

On the third of September, Poppy released Potter from the hospital wing. He came to my quarters that evening-- knocking, then pushing the door open immediately; I had not reset the wards.

"Potter." I had been trying to read some of the literature Poppy had given me on artificial limbs, and one monograph on aphasia, but I'd had to resort to a pressing charm to keep the books from falling shut onto my right hand.

"Severus," he said, enunciating carefully. "I can move my things. Out. If you want."

His eyes fell across the few caches where I'd gathered his things when I righted the room: his books on the shelf, his invisibility cloak and shoes in the entry. In the bedroom, Potter's clothes still hung in my wardrobe, but I'd remade the bed with clean laundered sheets that smelled of nothing but the cedar of the linen cupboard, and since then I had been able to sleep.

"That might be for the best," I said.

Potter shook his head, violently. "No, no." He took the book out of my hand and laid it down on the table beside me. "Not what might be best. What you want." He took hold of the wings of the chair, on either side of my head, and bent down so close I had to tilt my head to look up at him. "What," he said, very slowly and precisely, "do you want?"

I didn't want to bare my ugly stump to him, for his disgust and pity. I didn't want to feel my lost hand reaching for him, and feel only a twinge of phantom pain, instead of Potter's skin and hair against my palm.

I didn't want him to leave.

My hand was curled into a fist on my thigh. "If you're here out of any sense of obligation, Potter, or of pity--"

"No," he said. And so smoothly he must have rehearsed it, must have practiced saying it over and over, "I still want you, want to be with you."

I strained up and caught his mouth with mine, held him there with the press of my open mouth for the long seconds it took me to open my fingers, to reach out for the front of his shirt and hold on. He leaned in over me and followed my lips, not letting me draw away from the kiss for an instant. I pulled him down into the chair with me, till he was straddling my lap, his chest against mine and my hand pressed between us.

When I slid my hand further down, he did pull away. "No." He looked down, almost bashfully. "Think I-- one-- only have one..." He grimaced, lost for words.

"The legendary Potter resilience has its limits after all?" I smiled slowly. "Well. If you can only manage one go tonight, I suppose I had better make it worth your while."

He bared his teeth-- it wasn't quite a smile, though his eyes glinted. "Suppose so." He pulled away, but only to strip off his shirt and trousers and step out of his trainers, and then he was naked.

Naked, thinner than he had been, still fragile-seeming; his prick half-erect, the tender red head just emerging-- and I was still clad and shod, with my wand in my sleeve, and yet I felt like the vulnerable one. I looked at him, greedily, but I didn't stand up, not until he held out his hand for me, and pulled me to my feet.

I had never had Potter undress me. I should have asked him to, before, when I could have commanded him, when his hands carefully undoing my buttons would have been a supplication freely offered, and not a favor needed. More than once, I thought of drawing my wand and undoing every button and buckle and tie with a spell, the way I had fastened them. But he kissed my neck, and pressed close to let me feel his prick harden against my hip, let me feel it shockingly hot and damp against bare skin once he'd undone my trousers; and I only held his shoulder with my hand, and let him do as he would.

When we were both naked, he kissed my mouth again, and I held him tight against me for as long as he would let me, but after a breathless moment he did step back, and did look at my left arm, at the white gauze swathing the stump. He touched my shoulder gingerly, stroked the end of my collarbone with his thumb, but moved his hand no further. "Bad?" he said. "The pain?"

"It's getting better." I pressed my hand against his side. "Don't paw at the dressing unless you want to explain to Poppy why--"

"No," he said, and gave a snort of laughter. "Right." He grinned, though his eyes slid away from mine almost shyly; he reached out and rested his other hand in the small of my back. We were so close it was an effort of balance not to fall against each other, as careful as a house of cards; but when we collapsed, it was slowly, Potter's head coming to rest on my shoulder and our bodies settling together, balance shifting as we held each other up.

I could have thrust against him, could have distracted him-- I wanted to-- but the embrace seemed so fragile that I only breathed into his hair for long, long seconds, touched the warm skin of his back, his narrow, bony shoulder blades, the short fine hair at the back of his neck and the tender hollow of his throat, where his pulse beat fast against my thumb.

He kissed my neck again, and the thin skin below my ears, and soon I could not help but clutch at a handful of his hair, thrust against him when he moved, and then he scraped his teeth along my neck, and every thrust drew an answering snap of his hips and press of his prick against the seam of my thigh, and we stumbled together against the bed, balance completely lost.

Potter rolled us over until I was flat on my back; I pulled him down to kiss his mouth again, hard and thirstily, but he ended the kiss and slid down my body to take my prick into his mouth.

He sucked me as though he hoped to spend years at it, sliding up to tease me with his tongue and then slowly, slowly down, to just hold me in his mouth between swallows, steady pulses of strong, wet suction. I reached down to stroke his head, ran my hand over and over his skull and up through his hair, snarled my fingers in its tangles and scratched his scalp with my nails, lightly as I ever could, and he moaned around my prick and kept sucking, as though he'd missed it, as though he'd rehearsed this, too, rolling the weight of my cock on his silent tongue.

I thought he meant to make me come that way, and I was past thinking of anything else; past anything but thrusting up into his wet mouth and his broad hands; when his hand followed his mouth, slick and cool, the shock nearly undid me there. I opened my eyes; Potter threw a knee over me, and reached behind to screw his glistening fingers up inside him, fast, shallow-- it couldn't have been enough preparation, but he held my prick in one tight hand and worked himself onto me in short, stuttering thrusts, each one tearing a ragged breath from him, and from me. He opened around me in wrenching spasms, and when he finally sank all the way down, around me to the root, he was still impossibly tight; I reached out unsteadily and held his trembling thigh, my fingers skidding on the taut, tense skin; but then he grasped my upper arm, and leaned up, and thrust down around me, slow and hard and over and over, until he was moving upon me as easy and smooth as he ever had.

He still had his glasses on, fogged with breath and sweat and sliding halfway down his nose. He looked over the rims at me, unfocused, his eyes wide and irises blown. "God, oh. Fuck." Meaningless words still came easily to his lips: a long string of _yeah_s and _fuck_s and long-drawn monosyllables spilled out, coming quicker and more fluent as he babbled, as though his tongue were enjoying the chance to rattle unthinkingly again. I dug my fingers into his thigh, and thrust up hard into his body, once, twice, again-- he pushed my hips down and bore down around me and wrung my orgasm from me; I clutched at him as I came, bent nearly double around him and struggling to hold him.

His knuckles rippled up my belly; he was stroking his own prick, still slowly, but firm and steady, with intent. I seized his wrist. "No." I pulled his fist up his prick, and off, and worked my fingers between his until he opened his hand. "Not like that. I want..." I pulled his hand up to my chest and pressed it there for a moment. "Inside me. Come that way."

With his other hand, he nudged his glasses up his nose and studied me through the clouded lenses, and then he kissed my mouth, hard and quick. My own mouth was as slack with climax as the rest of me, open and yielding.   
I spread my legs for him; and he took my knees on his shoulders.

His fingers fumbled as he worked me open, hasty and clumsy. "F-- last, don't, I won't last, I won't last--"

"I don't care." I laid my hand over his own, where he held my leg. "I want this, too."

It hurt a little, when he pushed inside, but I shuddered and savored the pain, the first pain I'd felt in a month that I knew I could bear, that I knew would burn away so soon I would almost miss it.

Potter was right; he only lasted through a few, deep thrusts, just long enough to drive me back into the aftershocks of my orgasm, to make me wish I could come again when he went very still, turned his head and closed his eyes, and hissed through his teeth as his climax took him.

He fell against my chest and lay there for a long time. The frames of his glasses bit against my clavicle, and my thighs ached, and my left arm throbbed, pain reaching from the empty, grasping ghost hand all the way to my shoulder; and I wrapped my good arm around him to hold him in place, heavy over me, holding me together.

~*~

The Wizengamot general election came and went, though the real choices were made before the ballot boxes were ever set out: according to Remus Lupin, Amos Diggory agreed to stand for the Wizengamot on the condition that he not be considered for Minister, and Arthur Weasley bowed out of the Wizengamot races in exchange for the headship of the Department of International Magical Cooperation and a hand-picked staff. He might have asked for a flashier post-- Magical Law Enforcement, perhaps-- but either he or Molly must have been more politically savvy than appearances suggested; the IMC head would be poised to make policy on more than a merely national level.

And so the Wizengamot chose Andromeda Tonks as the new Minister of Magic. One of her first actions as Minister was to strike half the lycanthropy laws from the books-- giving werewolves the right, among others, to hold public office. Remus Lupin had not stood for election, nor angled for any sort of Ministry position, and I smelled a deal-- rights for werewolves, in exchange for Lupin's not exercising any of them to the inconvenience of the Gang of Three. But when the election was over and power transferred into somewhat legitimate hands, Lupin seemed glad enough to be quit of it. He stayed on at the castle, Minerva sending him to smooth tempers that she or I had frayed, but in between crises he loitered around the dragon paddock, until the dragons returned to Romania on a carefully-chosen weeklong route that zigged from Unplottable to Unplottable, keeping them mostly out of the Muggle eye. After that, though he was in residence, I saw very little of him, which suited me quite well.

Summer dragged to a close. The Ministry moved its last offices out of Hogwarts and into temporary quarters in London-- spread out, as its new permanent offices would be, over four different buildings for security's sake. And with a Wizengamot and a Ministry in place, the trials began.

Nearly all the Dark Lord's officers were dead, but no one assumed that only initiated Death Eaters had been responsible for atrocities, or that none of the rank-and-file were bound by oaths to continue the Dark Lord's work. Every prisoner had a hearing, with Veritaserum, though relatively few were ever charged with a war crime. Minor players, those who had followed the Dark Lord out of fear or avarice or a desire to be on the winning side, and whose worst actions in his service had been restricted to the battlefield, were released, contingent upon their making restitution, either in Galleons or in labor.

The suspected Muggle-killers, torturers, spies, Calais attackers, betrayers of Order sympathizers into the Death Eaters' hands, and the one surviving confirmed Death Eater all had full Wizengamot trials. Shacklebolt was in charge of the MLE now. He had taken depositions from nearly every survivor of the battle, had correlated accounts, and then had set his people to combing the wreckage and the photographs and the Veritaserum transcripts, trying to ensure that no one was charged on hearsay evidence alone. In this, too, I suspected Lupin's influence.

Some of those charged with war crimes were acquitted, including a few I would have staked my life were guilty; others were convicted whom I wished I could have believed were innocent. Peter Pettigrew, after his conviction before the Wizengamot, was extradited to the Muggle government at the Liaison Office's request, to stand trial in a Muggle court for multiple counts of murder, for arson and a host of lesser property crimes, and for blowing up a gas pipe in a London street seventeen years before, killing thirteen passers-by.

The NEWTs and OWLs were held; Potter sat them with the rest of his year. His scores were barely respectable, but no one cared. Bulstrode's NEWTs were more than acceptable, and she signed an apprenticeship contract. Longbottom got high passes in everything, even Potions.

Potter was still sharing my bed almost every night. After Weasley went home to the Burrow, after the NEWTs, he was with me every night. I didn't ask how he'd comforted Weasley. There was no answer that would have made me happy, and Potter never volunteered one, though the nights after his absences, he craved comfort himself; he would rub off against my thigh while I kissed him possessively, greedy for his tongue, or else he let me turn him around into a _soixante-neuf_ and sucked me sweetly and deep. Just before he came, he would stop sucking, distracted, and hold my prick gently in his wet mouth while he trembled and thrust and spilled; after a few times, the sudden stillness of his clever tongue became as arousing to me as anything else he could do with it.

In October, Minerva sent Potter, Lupin, and the Delacour witch, who'd gone back to Beauxbatons to teach Charms, to hand-deliver the Hogwarts letters to the students who had not yet arrived at the castle-- a few children of particularly astute or timorous wizards, who had fled with their families early on, and nearly all the Muggle-borns.

They told them about the war, about the rifts in the wizarding world that had led to it. They told them about the students who had fallen. They told them, also, that Beauxbatons had agreed to open its enrollment that year to any child who received a Hogwarts letter, and that Helena Granger had formed a support group for Muggle parents of magical children.

Potter put the surprisingly positive response of the parents down to such accommodations; he was the only who did.

He had been afraid his slow speech, his groping after words, would make a bad impression; he wrote out answers to every question he thought might come up, and practiced them until the bathroom mirror refused to listen any longer.

But what the parents remembered most from those discussions-- or so I later heard, from teachers more involved with Granger's organization than I-- was that their children's gifts exposed them to dangers they could not hide from, but that Potter and his comrades had spent the last year risking his life to protect people like them and their children, and teaching them to defend themselves.

I was sure he had been impressive. When he had time to prepare, and could keep a roll of notes in front of him, Potter's careful, considered speech and even the halting urgency with which he struggled after words gave him a gravitas well-befitting a war hero. He was unaware of it, and unassured; he blushed when he had to make any speech longer than a few sentences, though the heightened color only made him seem intense, impassioned. But though their attention made him supremely self- conscious, people listened when he talked.

And so Potter was the only one surprised when, late in October, Arthur Weasley asked him to go to Canada.

"He wants to send a derivation, a, a _delegation_." Potter leaned against a table in my workroom, Weasley's letter in his hands. "Canada, then America, then-- I don't know. He said Belize, maybe, but... long trip, it's a long _time_. From now." He watched me manhandle a cauldron onto the flame one-handed, around the new brass arm that still hung nearly-useless at my side, but he knew better than to offer to help. "Talk about secrecy, about rewrite the Statute. Rewriting."

That the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy would have to be rethought, before it was broken all to pieces, was received wisdom by now, though opinion varied widely on whether openness or retrenchment was in order. The immediate hue and cry over the events of the war-- the Ministry bombing, the dragons, the hot-air balloon, those atrocities of the Dark Lord's that had never been given an adequate cover story-- had died down, but the theories surrounding them had spread too far to be contained. And though Andromeda Tonks had imposed a host of secrecy requirements before agreeing to Pettigrew's extradition, his upcoming trial still had the wizarding world on tenterhooks.

"For what, precisely, does he wish you to drum up support?" Weasley favored relaxing the secrecy codes, of course, but there was much debate over how such a change might best be implemented.

"Nothing yet," said Potter. "The purpose of the delegation is to learn how the Secrecy Statute affects the daily lives of wizarding people." He'd rehearsed this part already, I realized; he was going. My brass fingers clattered against my palm. "Arthur wants us to look for, look into early wizarding education, the role of intermarried families, law enforcement and... thing. Obliviation thing. Policy."

"Us?" I said, though of course I should have known Potter would be sent nowhere without his honor guard. "Who else is he sending? Lupin?"

"Did you hear-- didn't you? Charlie flew from, _Flooed_ from Romania, this morning. He offered Remus a job, with the dragons, if he wanted it, and Remus show up last night to take it."

So Lupin had had enough of politics. I suppose I couldn't blame him, though running off to the Carpathians seemed an unnecessarily dramatic gesture.

Or perhaps not-- "I think he and Charlie have a thing," Potter continued. "No-- Arthur ast, ask Ron to go with me."

Of course. "Ah. So this is his scheme to get you to nursemaid his son. I suppose Arthur's tired of making sure he gets up in the morning, remembers to eat, that sort of thing?"

Potter seized me by the fronts of my robes and hauled me forward over the steaming cauldron. I caught myself against the table with my right hand; my left swung uselessly and clanged against its edge. "You," he said carefully, "will not make me run out on you." His glasses fogged with steam, hiding his eyes. "I'm going," he said. "Because I need to. It's not leaving you-- _I'm_ not. So don't try and make me."

I straightened up, and he let me go. "You know it would be easier in the long run."

"I know." He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his robes; his eyes, though unfocused and unprotected, were still stubborn. "If I wanted easy, would I be here?"

Potter spent Halloween night in my bed. I held him to me with both arms; the brass fingers still twitched and clenched, out of my control, until he clasped his own hand with mine-- I could not feel his skin or his nails, but I felt the strength of his grip and the new steadiness in my own hand.

I almost hoped he would leave before I woke, but he stayed to make his farewells. There was little more to say-- I had already told that him I would hear no promises from him, that I fully expected him to see other people and that I would certainly do likewise if I pleased, and he had only nodded and said he agreed with me. "But write," he said. "Write to me, just as a friend. No other promises, but promise that."

A clean break would have been so much easier. But I promised, all the same.

I thought he would stop writing to me. His letters grew rarer, as he seemed to gain confidence in his writing and speaking, and they stopped sounding like half-finished speeches and the scrolls of notes he had once kept, but even after he stopped using me as a sounding board, he still wrote. He always signed himself Harry, and so I addressed him as such, and eventually, in his absence, I started to think of him that way. The first time I mentioned to Minerva that I'd had a letter from Harry, she smiled so brightly I didn't have the heart to tell her that he'd written to say he'd fallen in love.

~*~

I next saw him four years later, in a pub at the rebuilt end of Caput Alley, down the street from my new shop. Bulstrode had finished her apprenticeship, and I'd left Slytherin House and my classroom in her hands to buy out a small apothecary's and set up as a custom brewer-- contract potion work, not retail, and some research projects funded by goblin venture capital, or by the Weasley twins' expanding commercial empire.

"So," I said, turning my glass in my hands and feeling the slickness of condensation, if not the cool or the wet, on the spelled leather glove I wore over my left hand, "what announcement is so momentous it had to be made face to face?"

Harry smiled; the grin was unchanged, the only thing about him I would still have called boyish. "I'm not here for a visit. I've come to back to England to stay."

He looked more pleased about it than I'd expected from the rumors I'd heard. "Does this have anything to do with Weasley's taking off for Nepal?"

"Tibet; he made a lot of ties with the wizarding immigrant community in Minneapolis," he said. "And how did you hear that?"

"Bill," I said.

"He's teaching Charms now, right?"

"For some definition of 'teaching,' yes. If it's not Ron Weasley's sudden need to master esoteric Eastern arts, then what brings you back here?"

"New job," he said. "Special Liaison to Her Majesty's Sorcerers."

"Alden's retiring, then?"

"End of the month-- and keep it under your hat until then. After that, it's just me; I'll be reporting straight to the Minister. _And_ the Prime Minister. And technically the Queen, though I don't think she gets involved much. She's been briefed, though."

"Don't let it go to your head," I muttered, and he snorted.

"Don't worry. I'll resist the, the things. Of power."

"Temptations?"

"Blandishments. That's it. I'll resist the blandishments of power."

I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing, just as he had said nothing about the skill with which I manipulated my brass fingers inside their glove.

Even speaking almost as carelessly as he once had, Harry still had a gravitas about him; when he took over the Liaison Office, he'd be an elder statesman at twenty-two.

Harry took a drink, looked down into his glass before meeting my eyes again. "I heard you were seeing Kingsley Shacklebolt."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Ron," he said, "who heard it from Bill. And Remus, who got it from Charlie who also heard it from Bill. I think you two gave poor Bill quite a scare, really."

"Oh, shut up," I said. "In any case, it's over now."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be; there wasn't much to it. Really not anything to it except the sex."

"There wouldn't have to be, would there?" Harry leered over the edge of his glass.

"No," I sighed. "No, that was quite enough."

We each stared into space for a moment, Harry imagining, I remembering. Harry was the first to shake off the image. "You probably heard that Josh broke it off with me, then?"

I nodded. "From Bill, who had it from--"

"You _told_ me you had no interest in the sordid details of my romantic exploits." He set down his glass; his face was sober. "So I didn't write you about him. I didn't think you wanted to know."

After my reply to his letter about the American boy, I hadn't really expected a response. But he had kept writing, long screeds with no hint of his personal life in them, but full of details about pagan religious groups' co-opting of the word 'witch' and the workings of the state Wizarding Extension Offices in the American plains and how a wizarding day school in St. Louis used a network of computing machines to offer its courses to students in the rural Muggle schools, interspersed with long digressions that made me wonder if he were channeling Granger, on the harm done by the Obliviate First policy and the need to pursue house-elf emancipation if we ever hoped to regularize relations with the Muggles.

They had been better reading than anything I'd ever expected to see from Harry's hand, and at times I had wondered whether Harry spoke about any of it with his American lover.

"I didn't," I said. "And I didn't think you'd keep writing either, truth be told."

"Yeah, well, old habits die hard, I guess." He held my gaze. "And you kept writing."

"So I did."

Harry reached across the table and touched my left hand. I could feel the light pressure of his fingers over the leather glove, feel the weight of his hand on mine. For an instant, I was glad he had not touched my flesh hand; I doubted I could have borne it, so strongly did I feel his touch to leather and brass. But then I longed to make the experiment. Both hands tightened half to fists on the table, but Harry moved his hand with mine, did not lift his fingers from the leather. "I'm glad you did," said Harry, and only then did he let go.

He set his palms flat on the table, as if he wanted them both where he could keep an eye on them. "Well," he said, looking down, "I should go see if the Cauldron has rooms; it's getting late." He stood up; I caught his hand before he could raise it, trapped it against the table.

Skin let me feel the warmth of his hand and the thrum of blood in his strong, square wrist.

"Don't be absurd, Harry," I said, as lightly as I could; at his name, I felt his hand jump under mine. "I have plenty of room."

He looked down at me, face carefully blank. "You've sure that's not going to be-- awkward?"

I drew in a deep breath and circled his wrist with my fingers, lifting his hand from the table; he was very still, except for the race of his pulse. "Harry," I said, "when you inevitably suggest that we go to bed together for old times' sake, I'd like to end up in my own bed, if you don't mind."

"Oh." Harry blushed, but he slowly turned his hand in mine until our fingers could twine together. "I actually hadn't planned to ask you that for a while yet." He slid out of the booth, still holding my hand, and pulled me to my feet. "We still have a lot of catching up to do."

"I'm in no hurry," I said.


End file.
